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Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Monday, January 26, 2015
Is it Friday yet?
*******Took this from here.
1. If you spoke English with an accent other than the one you currently have, how would you choose to sound?
I used to work with someone from New Zealand. She had the coolest accent, and sometimes I'd ask her questions that I already knew the answers to just so I could hear her talk.
2. Be honest: How do you feel about people who smoke?
I don't usually mind the people themselves, but I hate their habit. While I'm not asthmatic or anything, I find it difficult to breathe in the smoke when I'm around it. I also don't like the smell it leaves on you afterwards.
When I worked at my last job, I resented the smokers because they got to take smoke breaks. The rest of us were expected to work without one. That was very unfair.
3. Whose death touched your own sense of mortality the most?
There was a big group of us who used to go to the movies once or twice a month, or go out to the bars or whatever. Within that group was a woman I didn't really get to know that well until a few months before her death. She was a recent widow and her children were grown. I felt like sometimes she glommed onto me more than I liked, but because I wasn't working much and had a lot of time on my hands, we started to hang out more.
She'd been going to the doctor for awhile, but they couldn't seem to find anything wrong. She went to one after another, it seemed. Finally one doctor looked down her throat and saw a very large mass tumor there. He told her she probably only had six weeks to live. She was immediately admitted to a hospital in another town that could properly care for her and she never came home. I would try to visit her once a week or so, but missed the last week. From the very first visit, she was no longer the same person I knew. She couldn't talk, or walk, or eat, or really do much of anything. Because she was on so much medication, I don't think she even really knew that I was there. But I knew...
Surprisingly, I didn't cry when she died. I don't know why. It made me think about how we'd gone shopping just weeks before she went to the hospital. She'd bought shorts, groceries, and a variety of other things. I thought about how she'd never wear those shorts, or use those groceries. She had no idea when she bought those things that she'd never have an opportunity to use them. It made me think about life and how you just never know when your time is up.
I had an answering back then with messages recorded on a tape. One day shortly after her death, I came home and found the machine blinking back at me. I listened to the message and it was an old one from my friend. The message was something to the effect of, "Hi, it's Mary. I'm home now, give me a call when you get the chance." I think this was the very last message she had left me, and I am certain that I'd deleted it. There was no reason to save it! I tried to delete it repeatedly, but it never would let me.
4. Show and tell. What comes to mind first when you see this picture? Or tell a story if it reminds you of one.
Posted by sprinkles at 7:00 AM 4 showed me some love
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Monday, January 19, 2015
Happy MLK Jr. Day
This semester looks to be my busiest one yet. When I was scheduling classes last semester, I tried to give myself an hour between them so that I wouldn't feel rushed. Unfortunately, I have a zillion things to take care of in between classes so I have not been able to enjoy that free time. This week doesn't look any better either, sadly.
And the homework -- every semester, I sit down and write down all of my major assignments on the calendar so that I don't miss anything. This semester, I have at least two essays due for different classes almost every week in addition to other various assignments. I feel like I'm never gonna see the light of day until graduation! I'm worn out just thinking about it all.
So please forgive me if I'm not able to get around to visiting everyone as often as I might like.
Took this from here.
1. What's the worst advice you ever took?
Listening to my friends who told me to continue drinking was really bad advice!
2. Pick a divisive issue currently in the news. Explain to the best of your ability both sides of the issue as if you believe each side.
A big issue in the news here is gay marriage. Our state governor is against it, and is taking it all the way to the Supreme Court.
For - We should not discriminate by not allowing gays to marry. It has no bearing on anyone else other than those entering into marriage.
Against - God meant for marriage to be between Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Marriage between two men or two women is going against nature.
3. When you were a child, who were your favorite relatives?
Because my father was in the military, we didn't live near any of my parents' relatives. We would go to visit them maybe once every 5 years or so, or maybe they'd come visit us. I never really got to know any of them. My favorite one was always my aunt on my mom's side. She was always so nice! Even today, she's still my favorite.
4. Show and tell. What comes to mind first when you see this picture? Or tell a story if it reminds you of one.
I couldn't tell what this picture was of at first, but discovered that it's Niagara Falls when I went to save it. About a year or two before my dad died, he and my mom went there. They took a bunch of pictures, and it was really beautiful. My dad bought me a souvenir there, but I don't remember what it was. I do remember him telling me that he forgot his jacket that day, so he bought one at a shop there.
Posted by sprinkles at 7:00 AM 5 showed me some love
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Monday, January 12, 2015
Hard to believe...
Took this from here.
1. What is something you do well?
I don't know. Whatever it is, I haven't figured it out yet.
2. Name all of the vehicles you have owned in your adult life.
That's pretty easy, since I've only ever owned 3 vehicles.
The first one was a piece of s*^# Chevy Citation. It was old when I got it, and not in the best condition. My father bought it for me without me having any say in the matter, then told me that I would need to pay him back for it.
The next car was a Pontiac Sunbird, which I really loved! I only got rid of it because it was old and I wasn't sure how much longer it would hold out.
Then I bought a brand new Chevy Cavalier. It's old now, but it's all I have.
3. If you could be a fly on the wall anywhere and at any time in history, when and where would you choose?
There are so many options that it's hard to choose! It might be interesting to watch Leonardo da Vinci in action, or to watch Beethoven compose, or maybe even to watch President Kennedy speak. What would you choose?
4. Show and tell. What comes to mind first when you see this picture? Or tell a story if it reminds you of one.
It reminds me that I'm one of the few who does not have a cell phone. People look at me like I have 3 heads when I tell them that.
Posted by sprinkles at 7:00 AM 8 showed me some love
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Monday, January 5, 2015
It's Only The 5th, And It's Already Been An Expensive Year!!!
Apparently this is the year that I'm supposed to be made of money. Only someone neglected to mention this little fact to me, as I have none. What little I did have is now loooooooooooong gone.
So far this year, I paid to have someone come out to fix my heat. You know your house is cold when you wake up to see your windows covered in ice -- on the inside! The guy spent less than an hour fixing it, and charged me $80. It's a small price to pay for warmth though. My chi's and I were so cold!
I have a locksmith coming this morning to fix 3 doorknobs. They all use the same key, and they've all been giving me problems for awhile now. I can open the doors from the inside quite easily. Opening from the outside is an entirely different matter! I'm afraid if I don't get them fixed soon that I'll end up locked out one day.
Tuesday, I'll be going to the dentist. I bit down on something and lost a tooth! I knew the tooth was bad, but not that bad! Because it's right in the front, I need to get it fixed. I graduate in May, and can't doing interviews while I'm toothless! Thank God my mom said she'd pay for it. I've not been to the dentist in a very long time, and am anticipating that this will be a very expensive visit. The first appointment is just a consultation.
Because it's the first of the year, I also need to buy new city dog licenses. Plus the boys need their nails clipped, which is worth every penny to pay someone else to take care of them. I need to buy them dog food too.
School starts next week, so I also need to buy school supplies and textbooks. One class requires two textbooks, both of which are almost $200 each at the bookstore. Fortunately, I can buy them online cheaper. One class won't actually require any textbooks at all! The professor provides all the reading material online for us, but the reading is extensive. The first week, he wants us to read no less than 10 articles. He also wants us to print them all out and bring them to class too. So not gonna happen!!!
Once I graduate in May, I have 6 months to find a job and start paying those hefty student loans back. Which means my first payment will be in December. Nice! Nothing like having something cut into my Christmas funds once again!
Sometimes being an adult really sucks!
Posted by sprinkles at 7:00 AM 5 showed me some love
Thursday, January 1, 2015
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To my embarrassment I've never been to the Photographer's Gallery before. It turns out to be a tall, narrow building on a corner of Ramillies Street (number 16 to 18, to be precise) just behind Oxford Street East. It's a bit of an Aladdin's Cave, with exhibition spaces on the 5th, 4th and 3rd floors, as well as downstairs in the basement, next to the excellent shop full of photography books and equipment.
Since all the exhibitions are FREE, if you arrive before noon, and the ground floor has a comfy café with wifi and cakes, this is quite a cool place to meet up with friends or just take some time out.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize exhibition 2018
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation is a Frankfurt-based non-profit organisation which focuses on collecting, exhibiting and promoting contemporary photography. Deutsche Börse began to build up its collection of contemporary photography in 1999 and it now holds more than 1,700 works by over 120 international artists.
Together with The Photographers' Gallery in London, the foundation awards the renowned Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize each year, when a long list of entrants is boiled down to a short list of four. This year they were:
- Mathieu Asselin
- Rafal Milach
- Batia Suter
- Luke Willis Thompson
The work which got them onto the short list has been on display at the Photographers' Gallery since 23 February. On 17 May the winner was announced and it was Luke Willis Thompson, who picked up the first prize of £30,000.
So what is his work and the work of the other three photographers like? I'm glad you asked.
First the competition criteria. The prize 'rewards a living photographer, of any nationality, for a specific body of work in an exhibition or publication format in Europe felt to have significantly contributed to the medium of photography.' The press release states that 'All of the projects share a deep concern with the representation of knowledge through images, where facts can be manipulated and meanings can shift.'
I was to be surprised at just how knowledge- and information-based the work of all the finalists was.
Mathieu Asselin
The room devoted to Mathieu Asselin is a 'photographic interrogation of global biotech giant, Monsanto'. It was originally conceived and published not as a display but as a photobook, and the exhibition contains a number of documents, legal forms, invoices and testimonies, among much else that Asselin has assembled to document what he sees as the nefarious activities of this huge biotech corporation.
The book and display have the overarching title Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation and have been five years in the making. The book – and the excerpt of works here – are the result of a meticulous investigation supported by archival documentation, court files, personal letters, company memorabilia and photographs.
This photo shows David Baker whose brother Terry died at the age of 16 from a brain tumour and lung cancer, caused by exposure to PCB, a chemical manufactured at the nearby Monsanto Chemical works. A variety of toxic chemicals are present in the soil and water of Anniston at far higher than legal levels. In Asselin's account Terry is just one of Monsanto's victims.
Monsanto is known as a leading manufacturer of insecticides DDT, PCBs, Agent Orange and of genetically engineered seeds. Another photo shows one of the many farmers who Monsanto have pursued through the courts, accusing them of abusing the company's property rights by harvesting crops contaminated by, or originally sown from, seed genetically engineered by Monsanto.
Twenty years ago I did the research for a television documentary which tried to bring out the grotesqueness of a possible future in which Monsanto and a handful of other biochem companies could develop genetically engineered food crops:
- which only respond to Monsanto-produced fertilisers, insecticides and so on – so that if you buy the seed they have a monopoly of all the other products you need to buy to grow them
- and in which these companies own the intellectual copyright of the resulting grain crop, which you are not allowed to resow without paying them a licensing fee. Environmental activists were trying to get this practice banned before it could take off in the EU and the documentary followed their efforts.
So I'm familiar with the issues; none of this was really new to me.
The 'Asselin room' includes a variety of photographs, but also just as many legal, environmental and similar types of documents, blow-ups of newspaper articles and of Monsanto promotional images, as well as examples of the company's attempts to change their negative public image through children's TV shows and marketing campaigns.
I came, I saw, I read, I took it all in and it seemed a lot more like photo-journalism than a photography display, as such.
Rafal Milach – Refusal
Milach is Polish and his work explores issues and ideas around abandoned aspects of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics. He is particularly interested in the way governments and states distort and control information. To quote:
Rafal Milach's project focuses on the applied sociotechnical systems of governmental control and the ideological manipulations of belief and consciousness. Focusing on post-Soviet countries such as Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Poland, Milach traces the mechanisms of propaganda and their visual representation in architecture, urban projects and objects.
I found the most arresting items in his room to be:
1. A brilliantly stark photo of a viewing tower in Georgia. This was commissioned for the Black Sea village of Anaklia by the then-President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, in 2012, as an ostentatious way of showing the world how new and modern Georgia would become under his pioneering administration. It was a form of architectural propaganda.
Then, when Saakashvili fled the country after a coup in 2013, the tower was abandoned half-built, leaving it unused and useless, standing in an eerie, unpeopled wasteland.
2. A nearby monitor is showing a 'rap' video in which a Belarussian woman, Xenia Degelko, is singing to an enraptured crowd. The point is that this is a government-sponsored video created by the Belarus authorities and using 'youth culture' tropes to promote a patriotic, pro-government message. It is, thus, an example of Milach's overarching theme of government manipulation, and what he sees as the need for refusal of this manipulation.
Not a photograph, though, is it?
3. Another wall displays a line of print-sized images. These are photos of hand-made objects used in the chess schools based in government buildings across Azerbaijan. Each one is an optical illusion designed to help young Azerbaijanis' spatial imagination and abstract thinking skills. Seen through the slightly paranoid lens of Milach's project, they are included here as yet more examples of way that governments can manipulate young minds.
Batia Suter – Parallel Encyclopedia #2
My teenage daughter's bedroom wall is covered with photos of herself and her mates, posters of their favourite bands and tickets to gigs, images torn out of magazines and so on – images which speak to her, which say something, which click.
Batia Suter does the same thing. She collects books, often second-hand ones, full of images, and selects the ones which light her candle. Then she blows them up into large (two or three feet across) prints and then – this is the best bit – hangs them on the walls of galleries, thus creating, in the words of the commentary:
an encyclopaedic collection of visual taxonomies that expose the shifting and relative meanings of printed images depending on their context
Unlike the rather minimalist hangings of the previous two rooms, Suter's work is definitely 'immersive' covering all four walls from floor to ceiling.
The way the images are unframed helps them to meld together. And neighbouring images bring out new aspects and details you hadn't noticed in the individual works on their own. For example, it all looks very organic until you see the big pic of a vacuum cleaner and the even more incongruous close up of a printed circuit!
Her work is an exploration of how visual formats affect and manipulate meaning, depending on where and how they are placed. Apparently she has amassed a collection of over 1,000 publications to use as source material. What a simple, elegant and beautiful idea!
Luke Willis Thompson – autoportrait
As you enter the 5th floor room there's a very loud noise of machinery which I thought must be some kind of building works going on next door. But on crossing the gallery and walking into the pitch black alcove behind it you find a really old-fashioned 35mm film projector at work. It's this that's making all the racket.
And what is it projecting?
A silent black and white film showing a bust or portrait framing of a young black American woman, Diamond Reynolds.
In July 2016, Reynolds broadcast, via Facebook Live, the moments immediately after the fatal shooting of her partner Philando Castile, by a police officer during a traffic-stop in Minnesota. Reynolds' video circulated widely online and clocked up over six million views.
In November 2016, Thompson established a conversation with Reynolds and her lawyer, and invited Reynolds to work with him on an aesthetic response to her video broadcast. Acting as a 'sister-image' the artwork would break with the well-known image of Reynolds, until then only known as a distraught woman caught in a moment of violence, and then distributed far and wide as a shocking news story. As the gallery guide puts it:
Shot on 35mm, black and white film and presented in the gallery as a single screen work, autoportait continues to reopen questions of the agency of Reynolds' recording within, outside of, and beyond the conditions of predetermined racial power structures.
In other words it makes you compare and contrast her image in the self-filmed distraught moments after the shooting v and how that image was swept up in social media and then into a firestorm of angry comment about police racism in America – with this silent, calm and meditative image? Which is the real Diamond? Who owns her image, and her behaviour? How is anyone's 'personality' caught and distorted by film?
I'd like to link off to the video on YouTube but it doesn't seem to be on there. Here's a promotional still. Diamond is recorded, successively wearing a couple of different outfits, in all of them looking screen left, downwards, silent and expressionless. Quite obviously portrayed in a soulful, introspective mode. Which is the real Diamond? Can we ever know? Are we, the viewers, participants in yet another distortion or only partial presentation of her personality? Discuss.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018
To my surprise, this is the work which won the £30,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018.
There's no doubt that it's a sensitive and moving work in itself; that it's a thoughtful response to the way the young woman's image was 'kidnapped' by the circulation of the tragic video footage on Facebook, and that this is a careful effort by her, and Thompson as intermediary, to reclaim her image in a way controlled by her, to portray herself as more than the weeping victim of a moment of police violence.
But it's not at all a photograph, is it, and certainly not a 'body of photographic work'.
I wonder what established photographers make of the fact that one of the most prestigious prizes in photography was won by a film, that two of the other entries (Monsanto and Refusal) were essentially book projects which contained a lot of video, TV and text-based content as well as photos – and that the fourth entry (Batia Suter's) didn't include a single original photograph but was instead a collage of previously-existing images.
Also, the imperial dominance of American culture and values is a bugbear and bête noire of mine, so I was disappointed that, although the competition specifically mentions 'Europe' among the entrance criteria, two of the entries (Monsanto, autoportrait) are about entirely American subject matter.
The videos
Three of the entrants have a video about them on YouTube. They play consecutively, one after the other.
Related links
- Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize continues at the Photographers' Gallery until 3 June 2018
- The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation
The photographers' websites
- Mathieu Asselin
- Rafal Milach
- A useful interview with Rafal Milach
- Batia Suter
- Luke Willis Thompson on the Tate website

subset: commoncrawl


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Nick Griffin
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Nicholas John Griffin (born March 1, 1959) is a British politician, former chairman of the British National Party (BNP) and a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for North West England from 2009 to 2014, when he was expelled from the BNP.
- I do not just believe I am right, I know I am right.
- Cited by Kevin Toolis in "Race to the right" The Guardian (20 May 2000).
- We believe not just that our people are different from others, but that such genuine diversity is worth preserving. It is not a matter of 'superiority' or 'inferiority'.
- "Nick Griffin, The BNP: Anti-asylum protest, racist sect or power-winning movement?" British National Party (c. 2003)
- We do not demand for our own people any more than the basic human rights which we would extend to every nation, people and tribe on this planet: the right to preserve their own territory, traditions and ethnic identity. The right to preserve, in other words, the things which, by marking their differences from the mass of humanity, make them human and turn their society from an ant heap into a community. 'We believe, in a nutshell, in the human right to discriminate.
- Nick Griffin, The BNP: Anti-asylum protest, racist sect or power-winning movement? British National Party (c. 2003)
- The soft seduction of consumer global capitalism reduce the nations of the West to a rootless mass of Americanised consumers, without identity, without pride and without a future. Children identify with the grotesque and vulgar instead of noble heroes and beautiful princesses in castles. Teenagers ape the antics of degenerate pop-stars whose example leads hundreds of thousands into the living death of drug addiction, not to mention the tragedy of the image conscious girls (mainly) who feel compelled to starve themselves to get "the look" and of course the spiralling number of abortions. Adults perform meaningless jobs, in conditions of mind-destroying boredom, to earn enough money to buy the latest needlessly created want to be pushed on television as the thing without which their neighbours will regard them as worthless failures. Old folk die unnoticed and lie rotting for weeks, even months, in barred and bolted flats in inhuman tower blocks, unofficial prisons which become tombs for those who no longer have any economic value. Do not be fooled by the glossy packaging of the consumer society. Where state socialism was a creed of terror and stagnation, capitalism is one of apathy and death.
- Nick Griffin "The Deadly Twins" (August 2004)[specific citation needed]
- As for 'racism', the modern BNP opposes mass immigration and multi-culturalism on the grounds that human biocultural diversity is being exterminated by global capitalism. It demands for every single people and culture on planet Earth the right to self-preservation which it seeks for its own. Such a position is clearly out of step with the extermination-through-assimilation model of multi-culturalism promoted by the dominant ideology of the USA, but it equally clearly has nothing to do with 'hate' or wishing to harm others.
- Nick Griffin, Civil liberty – the indivisible right.[specific citation needed]
- In Britain and indeed the entire West, today, we are part way through a process – artificially imposed by a dogmatic liberal ruling class - that is steadily destroying the very possibility of preserving our racial and cultural differences, and the unique nations to which they have given rise.
- I'm not in politics for cheap cheers; if I was I could probably have had a safe Tory seat years ago. I'm in it, among other things, because I want to help stop the immigration which is destroying this and every other white nation in the world. Then I want to see that deadly tide turned.
- Nick Griffin, No More Time For Peter Pan.[specific citation needed]
- Yes. There is a wider range of takeaway food. That's it.
- Nick Griffin, The Battle for Barking.[specific citation needed] When asked if there was anything good about immigration.
- The BNP isn't about selling out its ideas, which are your ideas too, but we are determined to sell them. Basically, that means to use saleable words – such as freedom, identity, security, democracy. [...]
Once we're in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, then perhaps one day the British people might change their mind and say, 'yes, every last one must go'. But if you hold that out as your sole aim to start with, you're not going to get anywhere. So, instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity. [...]
There's a difference between selling out your ideas and selling your ideas, and the British National Party isn't about selling out its ideas, which are your ideas too, but we are determined now to sell them, and that means basically to use the saleable words, as I say, freedom, security, identity, democracy. Nobody can criticise them. Nobody can come at you and attack you on those ideas. They are saleable.
- – talking to the American Friends of the BNP — Burgess, Kaya (12 June 2009). "White supremacist gunman James W. von Brunn had links to BNP". London: Times Online. Retrieved on 12 June 2009.
- 10 things you should know about the BNP when you watch Question Time tonight. The Independent (Thursday 22 October 2009). Retrieved on 19 January 2015.
- {{cite web|title=PANORAMA: UNDER THE SKIN [Transcript]|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/panorama/transcripts/transcript_25_11_01.txt%7Cwebsite=news.bbc.co.uk%7Cpublisher=BBC%7Caccessdate=19 January 2015}
- Western values, freedom of speech, democracy and rights for women are incompatible with Islam, which is a cancer eating away at our freedoms and our democracy and rights for our women and something needs to be done about it.
- [The Koran is] not a religious book, but a manual for conquering other people's countries.
- Same-sex marriage isn't about rights of gay people. It's fundamentally an attack by a Trotskyite-Leftist and capitalist elite which wants the pink pound and the pink dollar. It's an attack on marriage. It's an attack on tradition. It's an attack on the fabric of our society. [...] Teach them about homosexuality? That's not in any way for the rights of homosexuals. That's some dirty pervert trying to mess with the minds of my kids, and I think it's great that a major European power has stood up and said: Leave our kids alone!


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Dual ability: P.K. Yonge football player also in school band
P.K. Yonge's football field is silent Friday, but not empty.
A breeze plays over the curls of grass, where tubas and trumpets rest like carefully placed artifacts in a museum, and sunlight streams from behind clouds, bounces off the silver instruments and splinters into new beams of light. In the center, about 40 kids lie in a circle, sprawled out, dead.
They're not really dead. They're acting.
This is PKY's marching band. It just performed the final act of its routine, "Heartbeat," a near 15-minute performance that crescendos with a full circle of noise from the wind and percussion sections.
The act swells like a wave, rising, rising, rising, until it peaks and crashes into a thick splat. That's when the marchers unleash their shock ending: the heart attack.
During the last eight counts, the ensemble's wind and color guard members drop their instruments in agony.
They stagger toward the middle, clutching their chests, screwing their faces, reaching for air. Then they collapse on the ninth and final count.
The percussionists magic their instruments into making the flat line noise of a heart monitor. The time of death: 3:31 p.m. Just as soon as it begins, it ends.
There's a moment of dead silence. No one rises. Then a voice rings from the press box overlooking the field. It's Willie Cobos, the band's co-director.
"That was it!" Cobos, 23, shouts. "Take this and run with it. Whatever you felt, take it and run with it to the top. We were a little bit tired at the end. But holy moly. Yes."
Fall has been tiring for PKY. The football team struggled, capping its 1-9 season last week with a 33-0 loss to Keystone Heights.
But that doesn't mean fall season can't finish on a high note for everyone. With state competitions approaching Saturday, the school's marching band is active as ever, meticulously refining its hyper-visual routine.
And one unusual student, whose season should be over, will have the chance to participate.
Riley Stewart, 15, isn't just an offensive and defensive lineman on the Blue Wave's football squad—he's also the proud owner of a baritone in the marching band.
When he isn't gridlocked with a beefy opponent, he's swaying with the band.
The sophomore balances the ultimate Friday night juggling act, but he says it can get hectic.
"The most prominent issue I have with it is scheduling," he said. "It's not incredibly hard, but I always have to decide: What am I going to do today? Am I going to band, or am I going to football? Band? Or football?"
Riley's love for both started in middle school. Friends were joining band. The football team was winning local Boys & Girls Club competitions. It all seemed fun, exciting, new, and the decision to pick one over the other was too difficult.
So he stuck with both.
It wasn't until eighth grade that he had to consider the implications of competing in both at the high school level. Football would be grimier, tougher. Marching band would require a new attention to discipline and precision. Together, the two would be potent.
He struggled with the decision, and arranged a meeting with PKY's football coach, Rob Cox, to discuss doing both.
"I was asking him, 'Hey, I really want to play football, but I really want to play band. Is there any way I can do both?'" Riley recalled. "And he was like, 'Well sure, look at this guy, Dominique Jenkins."
Jenkins was Riley's prototype, a trumpet player in the band and a successful football player who graduated last year and currently plays at Campbellsville University, according to Cox.
"He kind of was running around crazy. You could tell he really enjoyed it," Cox said.
Jenkins' energy and enthusiasm drew Riley in, too. After getting the chance to watch the older band-football standout, he knew he wanted to do the same thing.
The downside, Riley knew, was the stress it would dump on his parents. But they were unfazed by the challenge, his mother, Cathy Stewart said.
"You have one opportunity to help them grow up," she said. "We didn't want Riley to not be involved in something he wanted to do. We wanted to support him."
It sounded relatively simple. Both practices were after school, pickup time was about the same. The problem was distance. The Stewart family lives east of Melrose, making the daily commute about 30 miles. The lengthy journey makes scheduling painful, but the family finds a way.
"I've gotten to those points where my parents are really stressed," Riley said. "I had a talk with them and said, 'I can't do that anymore. It's really hurting you guys.' And they said, 'No, don't put this on our shoulders. You'll be driving soon. You can do this yourself. Do what you want to do.'"
During the long car rides in his dad's black SUV, Riley sometimes experiences what he calls "football dreams." He can picture it all: stadium lights flooding the field, cleats tearing up the grass, a ball wrestled loose, floating helpless in space.
"I've always dreamed a little bit," he said. "I get in the car and I'll just be thinking about it. My muscles are moving as I'm running."
But Riley doesn't need to dream about running—he already spends the majority of the day doing it.
There's band practice Tuesday from 3 to 5:30 p.m., Wednesday starting during the last hours of the school day till 5:30 p.m. and on Friday at the same time. Competitions are on Saturday.
That's just the band schedule.
Monday is football. Wednesday is football and band. Thursday is football. Friday is football and band. The words start to look the same with enough time. Riley calls them his "half-and-half days" instead of two-a-days.
"On Wednesday, I'd jump after band practice, run down to football, put some pads on and practice with those guys," Riley said.
Sometimes he'll make it right after warm ups, with practice about 30 minutes in. Other times, he'll arrive with 30 minutes left and have to figure out how to learn what he missed. Sweaty football players continue to drill, glued into their routine; band members run through a new foreign routine; and Riley stands alone like a weird puzzle piece, unsure of where to fit, muttering "Oh, dangit. Dangit. Dangit. Dangit."
Riley understands he'll miss practices because of his cramped schedule. It just makes him feel bad, he said.
"I let my coach and my team down when I miss," he said. "I don't want to do that."
Nobody wants him to feel guilty—that's why Cox and Jamie Burg, PKY's band director, coordinate schedules to figure out what's conducive for Riley.
That's not to be confused with special treatment, Burg, 32, said.
"We don't lower the bar because he's also a football player," she said. "The bar is the same. We sit him down and tell him what he missed and what he needs to prepare for. Whereas the band got 40 minutes, uniformity, Burg explained. The show is meant to reflect one cohesive unit, one large body, one group walking in time, playing in time and dancing in time. No one's supposed to stick out. And Riley does.
Each half time show starts the same.
Shakos bob. Uniforms and robs hang crisp and at the ready. The instruments shine like a knight's armour as the marchers stand like soldiers and their commander, the drum major, overlooks them from his podium. Any whisper could slice the mystical tranquility of the pre-performance ambience.
Then Riley sprints onto the field. He removes his shoulder pads and helmet and stuffs them underneath the drum major's podium. Then his faithful co-director, Cobos, greets him with his baritone in hand. Riley accepts it and dashes into line. It's routine.
He's not dressed the same. He's in a blue mesh undershirt and stained football pants. His cheeks flush like tomatoes from playing, and he wears scuffed cleats instead of black dress shoes. But he moves with as much intensity as anyone. And he stands out, he breaks the sameness.
"He looks different, so your eyes immediately go to him," Burg said. "With all eyes on him, he's got to be on his A-game. It takes a lot. I wouldn't want to do both."
Cox also supports Riley's two-activity craving but worries that the balance will be tough to keep up.
"As he gets older it's going to be a little more difficult," Cox said. "He's starting to become more important in both. Next year, he'll be good enough to start. That's going to be tough."
What's equally tough is the flak, the teasing and poking from band and football members. But Riley has a unique method: He uses both to combat the other.
"I get some of the hard talk," he said. "You know the stereotypes, 'Oh, he's a band geek. Oh, you're a football jock.' I get both both ways.
"I use band and football to cope with them. It's valuable to me to do both because I love both of them so much."
His resolve is noticeable, particularly to junior Ed Bonahue.
Bonahue, 16, plays football and is an active member of the school's vocal ensemble. He sings in school musicals — he's no stranger to jokes.
"Sometimes my teammates will say, 'Ed, sing me a song,' or 'Where's Ed? He's probably off singing,'" he said. "I laugh it off. Sometimes I'll sing if I'm in the mood."
When Riley gets teased, Bonahue said he notices a similar reaction.
"I think he takes it well. He accepts his identity and he's passionate about both," he said. "If he does catch anything, he shakes it off and says, 'Well, that's how it is.'"
Practice is over now. Riley's cleaning up. He's the last one in the school's band room and looks like a child in a giant's bedroom. Long shelves stack against the wall and book bags litter the carpet. The space is about as large as a fancy restaurant.
He's talking about quitting — not band or football, just the idea.
"I don't try to wrap my brain around it so much," he said, tucking his baritone bag into a cubby. "In my head I know what I need to do. You can't think, 'Oh, if I quit this it's going to make my life a lot easier.' No, it's not going to make my life easier. I don't like the idea of quitting. To me, if I quit, I've lost."
He gives the room one last look then turns out the light and leaves. In the hallway outside the room, he's staring at a case of glittering trophies. A ray of late afternoon sunshine breaks through the door at the end of the hallway and casts a sparkling sheen over the metal.
"These are the band's trophies," he said, pointing to rows of towering trophies, some as tall as a kitchen chair. "They make it worth it."
States is as close as history, and the hallway is so quiet, one can almost hear a heartbeat.


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Happy #ForgivingFridays everyone! Yay! This is an opportunity for you to let go and forgive. You can do your post ANY DAY this week! Anything that inspires YOU to forgive and choose love – even if you're struggling. e.g., write a poem, share a quote or video, do an act of kindness, forgive yourself or someone else. 🙂 I look forward to see what you do!
Today's Forgiving Fridays is how to love my upset!
As I was driving in to work, I started crying. A part of me doesn't want to move. I've moved so much in the past few years. I just want to rest, and to avoid feeling the uncertainty of where I'm moving (I don't know yet!) and whether I'm moving in with David (my partner 🙂 ).
I did four simple steps this morning to help me forgive and be really good to myself – including walking the labyrinth! And I made a video out of them for today's #ForgivingFridays.
I'm sharing this in the hopes that it may help you to forgive too. Friday is a great reminder that you can let go of whatever you're upset about & be really good to yourself.
You'll see 4 simple steps in the video:
Step 1: Take a pause
It sounds simple and can make a big difference. I am aware that I can push down my feelings and think there's something wrong with them. When I took a pause today, I reminded myself to be ok with exactly where I am. Acceptance is a gift!
Step 2: Tune inside
Take a short, silent break to contact the love and wisdom inside. It may be a prayer, a meditation, or saying your affirmations (Right, Nikki? Nikki picks affirmation cards every day I think.)
I walked the labyrinth! When I move my body physically, somehow that helps me to tune inside and be present to my inner guidance.
As I walked, I said prayers for my move and my life.
Step 3: Forgive yourself – what else? 🙂
If you notice judgments coming up with whatever it is that's upsetting to you, just forgive them. It's a great way to accept where you are, release the upset and come back to your own loving.
It can be really easy! I use the phrase "I forgive myself for judging …. " and enter what the judgment is. For example:
I forgive myself for judging myself for feeling scared about my move.
I forgive myself for judging myself for wanting all my ducks in a row.
& a biggie….
I forgive myself for judging myself for forgetting that home is inside of me.
Step 4: Have a reminder
Remind yourself that you are the love! That love is the way. I have love sunglasses ❤ . This way, if I get upset again later, I can put on my sunglasses to help me choose love and receive the nurturing of that.
So this is a reminder to love yourself today, to forgive on this #ForgivingFriday.
I also want you to know that as I walked the labyrinth, I sent a prayer to each of you.
I am SO SO grateful for all of you who contribute to Forgiving Fridays. I learn so much from you! Here are contributions from this week & some from last week too – they were magnificent:
Etta of Simply Etta D. gave us incredible keys on doing habits of Self-care. Plus, she writes about her own experience – with Belly Dancing! Go Etta!
Pragalbha of Infinite Living shared a poem on the courage it takes to let go of self-judgment and invites us into a deep experience of self-compassion and kindness. This is so important.
Frank of Poetry, Short Prose and Walking contributed a short poem called "Food of Love" – each word I read was like a drop of wisdom and peace. Forgiveness takes many forms!
Anita of Healing Words wrote a heart-warming post on losing her dog and how she helped herself by listing what makes her heart sing. So simple and powerful! Bless you, Anita. 🙂
Revived Writer contributed a gorgeous poem on love and the freedom of forgiveness to help us remember that we are all love. Her words radiate caring – thank you!
In case you missed it from last week:
Sgeoil contributed a gorgeous poem and photo on embracing the moment and living in joy. I felt the energy of joy come off the post!
Nikki of A Kinder Way illustrated the many benefits of Morning Pages, including clarity on how to handle a conversation and – you guessed it – doing Self-forgiveness. Such a creative technique!
Kathy of KE Garland started a new monthly blog post of consciously choosing to blog about someone or something great – positively on purpose. How cool is that?
I'd like to end with a quote from Buddha – to me, he's saying that we can see through the eyes of love because we ARE love.
(Second Sedona photo is by David Sand, my partner.)
It's really courageous to forgive. So however you do that today, acknowledge yourself for your courage and strength of heart. I do – I acknowledge myself and you!
I love you.
**This is my contribution to RagTag's challenge Contact and Frank's photo challenge, Row. Frank, I often want to have my ducks in a row. The truth is, the row is inside of me – it is love and guides me perfectly! Thank you for this amazing challenge. I love them!**
Here are the guidelines of #ForgivingFridays:
- Every day is Friday! Do a post today or anytime this week.
- Be creative – there's LOTS of space for your expression! Write a poem, take a photo, post a quote, share your story … what opens your heart?
- Include #ForgivingFridays in your tags
- Create a pingback link to this post so I can find you.
- Have fun – you are awesome!


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Owner's blog:
There was a lot to learn and a lot to do at Blog Paws 2011 and almost all of it seemed to involve posing Capycoppy and Super Gari with various props. Some of my favorites were the amazing paintings by artist BZTAT. I have always loved BZ's work, including the above painting of her famous cat, Brewskie Butt. I could hardly pass up the opportunity to have the plushies drinking his "morning brew."


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What's New
Nori Font by Positype
First, the important information…Nori is a hand-lettered typeface that contains over 1100 glyphs, 250 ligatures, 487 alternate characters, 125+ swash and titling alternates, lining and old style numerals.
To make sure it is perfectly clear—Nori is the result of brush and ink on paper. The textures produced in each glyph are real and the imperfections are intentional and add to the sincerity of the letters. I say this to be as blunt as possible in order to avoid confusion and to frame what this typeface represents—calligraphic, handwritten letters captured digitally for their warmth and poetic variation for print and screen.
Like my handwritten, calligraphic or brush-driven faces before it (the Baka series and the TDC2 2010 winning typeface, Fugu), Nori is a product of my analog and digital hand. To view the words and sentences formed by this typeface is to look at how my hands, yes hands, make letters. The fluidity, as well as the irregularity, is human, honest and intentional—to do so lets the brush I am holding breathe life into each letter. Once digital, any number of points and repetitive processes can't mask its influences—and I like that.
The brush, a simple instrument, my tool, my friend designed to emulate traditional Japanese sumi-e brushes... the Pilot Japan Kanji Fude brush pen. Each letter, each variation was written over and over again until I found the right combination. From there, each was scanned, digitized and optimized. Points were removed in order to 'clean' the glyphs up some but I did not want to compromise the integrity of the actual brush stroke. Once this base set of characters (about 350) were completed, the thoughtful manipulation of the glyphs, their gestures and forms were further expanded to solidify the embellishments used within the ligatures, alternates, swashes and additional features.
This process was admittedly self-indulgent to an extent. I wanted the words created with this typeface to have the flexibility of variation and cohesiveness of movement that someone fluidly producing these letters by hand might have.
I hope you enjoy this typeface as much as I did during the six months working on it.
A specimen and style guide is included with the purchased of Nori.
Tags: Casual Script, Distressed, Font, Formal Script, Handwritten


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Suggest a site for Sitehis Directory
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Note: As a web directory we are selective in accepting submissions, we do not accept all sites submitted.


text:
The Chase Beanie is constructed in a soft 9 gauge stretchable rib-knit fabric that ensures comfort and a fit suitable for everyone. Features a woven Carhartt WIP label on the front. One size.
Disclaimer - Please note we only ship Carhartt WIP to the following destinations: Andorra, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canary Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Republic Of Ireland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Turkey, Wales, Slovakia.
Any orders placed for Carhartt WIP outside of these categories will be cancelled and refunded without notice.
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text:
By Dennis Romero
The Clark County coroner is investigating the death of a 24-year-old who collapsed outside Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas on Saturday morning.
An autopsy was being conducted this weekend, but results aren't yet available to the media, an official at the coroner's office told us. If drug use is suspected, it's likely that a cause-of-death determination will be put off until investigators get their hands on toxicology test results.
The raver, who collapsed outside the three-day festival at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, was identified as Montgomery Tsang of San Leandro, California.
He was pronounced dead at a University Hospital at 6:15 a.m. Saturday, authorities said.
It's the third death of an Electric Daisy Carnival Las Vegas attendee in three years and, if you include the former Los Angeles and Dallas incarnations, the seventh death tied to the festival since 2011.
EDC Los Angeles moved to Vegas in 2011 after it was shut out of the government-run Los Angeles Coliseum. L.A. officials expressed concern about drug use associated with the event after a 15-year-old girl who had sneaked into the concert died of an ecstasy overdose.
Insomniac, the L.A.-based promoter behind America's biggest dance-music festival, sent us a statement from company spokeswoman Jennifer Forkish:
Today we learned some very tragic news, that after attending the festival a guest of the show has passed away. We are deeply saddened by this news, and hope that everyone will join us in keeping his family and friends in their thoughts during this very difficult time. Dance music fans pride themselves in being part of a loving community and, as we get ready to start the second night of the show, we ask everyone to help us keep this event safe. Look after your group of friends, utilize the buddy system, and if you see something, say something. No one should ever hesitate to ask any of our medical staff, public safety personnel or Insomniac staff for help, or call 911 in case of an emergency. One death is one too many, and we all must do our part to keep each other safe, healthy and happy, tonight and every night.
In 2011, Insomniac signed a five-year contract to hold the biggest edition of Electric Daisy Carnival at the Vegas racetrack, which means the EDM festival will have one more year in Sin City before organizers and local officials can consider if the 134,000-person-a-day party should go on.
Tragedy aside, the festival has been a good fit for Vegas, which lights up each June as ravers hit the strip and the top DJs in the world fly in for both the festival and for side gigs at the city's cash-cow clubs.
Local radio blasts electronic dance music from the festival's acts all weekend. Billboards around town advertise EDC DJs. Hotels get slammed. And rave traffic clogs the strip well into breakfast time.
Last year, a state lawmaker aimed an 8 percent tax squarely at Electric Daisy Carnival, which has operated under a loophole that allows outdoor events like it to skate. It'll be interesting to see if local officials try to squeeze Insomniac again as its contract comes up for renewal next year.
One thing seems clear: Loss of life isn't going to help EDC's case. It never has.
Correction: An earlier version of this story listed an incorrect number of deaths associated with EDC.
Send feedback and tips to the author. Follow Dennis Romero on Twitter at @dennisjromero. Follow LA Weekly News on Twitter at @laweeklynews.
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It was when I witnessed the staff at Brixton Cycles standing worried by a distraught customer that I first appreciated the intense human dramas played out at the bike shop. The woman had just been given some bad news about the cost of fixing her bicycle – or the impossibility of repair. She collapsed into such hysterical sobs that someone scurried off to the back offices to find a chair, sit her down and offer her whatever the bike-shop equivalent of grief counselling is. I'm sure they'd done everything they could.
|A Surly Big Dummy outside Brixton Cycles: who knows
what dramas lurk inside the doors?
It was only the messiest of countless collisions I've witnessed in bike shops between people's expectations about the economics of cycling and the reality. Because it costs nothing to jump on a bike in the morning - and people forget that assets require regular maintenance and occasional replacement - many expect it to cost nothing at all. I can't pretend to be entirely bemused. I open my wallet with something like gay abandon for the bike shop. But I never quite remember that the same money is no longer available to replace trousers worn out by catching on mudguards or shirt collars worn out by over-optimism about my neck's fatness. I wander round for the most part in the clothing equivalent of the squeaking, buckled-wheel bikes I encounter on the roads – shirt collars frayed, trouser seats nearly worn through.
Yet one doesn't need to cycle for long in most western countries to encounter someone who thinks cycling should be costing far more. This was roughly the view of the SUV driver who came crowding into the cyclist-only advance stop area at a set of lights one night on south London's Clapham Road. As I tried to turn right across the oncoming traffic, he should, I pointed out, have been behind me, giving me space. "You don't pay road tax!" he leant out of his window to shout. It was an only slightly less sophisticated version of the argument that John Griffin, the chairman of Addison Lee, London's biggest private-hire car company, put forward in a recent issue of his company magazine where he ranted about the danger cyclists posed and their failure to pay road tax. "It is time for us to say to cyclists 'You want to join our gang, get trained and pay up'," the chairman opined.
|A beautiful, up-to-date bike: all in a day's work for
the market's invisible hand
Cyclists consequently find themselves in some dark middle ground between the paid-for-but-well-funded city of Motoring and the free-but-clearly-unchargeable village of Disregarded Pedestrianism. Most are paying out far more to the private sector than they might like to keep their bikes on the road – but getting ever-lighter, ever-faster, ever more beautiful bikes in return. They are meanwhile paying, in many people's view, nothing for use of road networks towards whose uptake most motorised users pay substantial annual taxes. They get in return roads built almost wholly for non-cyclists, and the contempt or antipathy of the police forces meant to keep those roads safe. A powerful headlight is needed to illuminate this road. Who, if anyone, is getting ripped off here? Could there be a better arrangement?
There is certainly an irony about watching the smashing of free-market capitalism's carbon fibre road bike into liberal cyclists' custom-built retro roadster at Brixton Cycles, the bike shop that attracts the vast bulk of the Invisible Visible Family's substantial bike expenditure. The shop avers itself an opponent of normal, capitalistic ways of doing things and is a workers' cooperative. It is festooned with the paraphenalia of anti-establishment urban culture. I've grown so used to them I barely notice them. But, recently, as we left the shop the Invisible Visible Girl stayed, her 10-year-old faced glued to a sign in the window. "Daddy, what's a Dykes on Bikes ride?" she asked.
|The Invisible Visible Man's Surly Long Haul Trucker
He knows he's used this picture before - but suspects
others must enjoy gazing at it just as he does
Yet capitalism's genius for parting people from their money screams so loud from every corner of the shop that even adverts for biking Lesbians can't drown it out. I used 15 years ago to reach down to the bike's down tube to change gears on my early road bikes. When I bought my Surly Long Haul Trucker touring bike in late 2007, I was delighted to find I could change gears between a choice of 24 with a sideways flick of either the brake levers or little switches beside them. Two years later, I found shifters for a mere 24 gears were no longer available. Instead, for much the same price, I was offered seamless shifting between 27 speeds.
When I first brought a road bike from Edinburgh to London in 1997, I had to glue in ineffective Kevlar linings to protect them against puncture risks. Now, thanks to the latest Schwalbe Marathon Plus tyres, punctures are rare, landmark events. My early road bikes' brakes were neither strong nor easy to service. My Long Haul Trucker boasts easily adjustable brakes that stop me quickly and efficiently from a substantial speed – and that even a mechanical know-nothing such as I can adjust. Twenty years ago, I wrestled with dim lights demanding heavy batteries and apt to stop working suddenly. I now attract complaints from those around me for the dazzling brightness of far smaller, lighter, less energy-hungry lights.
|Denmark's Henrik Norby with the Viva Bikes
the market tells him to design
The market's invisible hand has, in other words, fitted bike manufacturers' products to cyclists' real needs as smoothly as a well-lubricated gear cable slips through its cable housing. No mere bureaucrat, for example, could have anticipated the sudden rush away from the order and progress of ever-improving gears into the chaos of gearlessness. But the world has suddenly filled, without breakdowns in supply or vast deliveries of unwanted bikes, the gearless, sometimes brakeless, pared-down machines some of the public seem to want. Cycling advocates have no need to pester the manufacturers to meet their needs. Whatever the market's shortcomings in, say, providing stable banks or creating just societies, it has responded to cyclists' changing whims as smoothly as a new chain and rear cassette mesh when bidden by STI shifters like those on my bike.
The transmission between governments and cyclists' needs works more like the derailleurs on some unloved old mountain bike abandoned outside a town hall. The reactions are either delayed or over-sudden, the outcome unpredictable and everything accompanied by a great deal of squealing.
Rust clogs up the mechanism. The sense that cyclists will never exist in large enough numbers to justify significant spending fouls up many links along the chain. The feeling that cycling is an optional extra sits like great blisters of rust on the rear mechanism.
But undoubtedly the most obstructive bit of rust - two great browny-red agglomerations around the wheels that keep the chain taut - is the feeling that there somehow isn't a stream of money that justifies spending on cycling. It helps to make the police, largely untroubled by insurance companies' worries about the cost of cycle accidents, apathetic. It helps to bore local politicians eager to shape dramatic new junctions for cars, rather than dinky bike lanes. The outraged anger of people like John Griffin or the man beside me on Clapham Road makes the politicians scared of being seen to clean off the rust.
The problem takes me on a mental journey to some outbuildings of Oregon State University, in the neat college town of Corvallis. There the university some years ago devised equipment to charge cars for their road use in Oregon by a more rational method than the simple gas tax. A meter, guided by a GPS beacon, would measure the car's mileage on Oregon's roads and in the most congested area around Portland. Charges would vary according to the time of day, the car's carbon emissions and a range of other factors. At fuel stations, an electronic pad would detect the meter, knock the fuel duty charge off the driver's bill and collect the required road-user charge.
Oregon paid for the apparatus I saw in Corvallis because fuel tax revenue, shrinking as car engines grew more efficient, no longer covered even the state roads' repair costs. Most European countries try to cover the costs of new roads, accidents, pollution, greenhouse gases and congestion as well. But, whatever the approach, introduction of so much clearer and more straightforward a charging system might, I think, have eased even the Angry SUV Driver's frustration. It would have been clear that he was paying for the damage his SUV did – and that what he paid wasn't covering everything. Most transport economists even in heavily-taxed Britain think motoring tax receipts fall at least £3bn short of covering all the costs motoring imposes. My taxes are already helping to foot the bill for cars – it's hard to see I should be charged, as Mr Griffin wants, for using my bike as well.
|An Addison Lee cab in traffic: price signals might
keep him in line
But it's not necessary to wait until everywhere adopts a system like the Oregon experiment – which the state has now, sadly, abandoned – to see the magic of clear, strong price signals working to protect cyclists. Cyclists swarmed on April 23 toAddison Lee's offices to protest against Mr Griffin's comments and demand consumers boycott the company. The protest echoed a practice I've occasionally adopted when harassed by a particularly aggressive taxi driver. If the driver remains unrepentant after one complaint, I reach for the passenger window, knock on it and shout to the occupant, "no tip!".
It's a tactic that's never well-received and seldom calms down a confrontation. But it's hard to imagine that, if my knocking on the window prompts a stream of passengers to leave a few more pounds in their purses, there won't be at least some change. The market's invisible hand is unlikely immediately to make cars as responsive to cyclists' needs as bike manufacturers already are. But it could start nudging things imperceptibly towards the right direction.


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'Looking to kill:' 4 slain at French Jewish school
TOULOUSE, France - A gunman on a motorbike opened fire Monday at a Jewish school, killing a rabbi and his two young sons as they waited for a bus, then chased down a 7-year-old girl, shooting her dead at point-blank range. It was the latest in a series of attacks on minorities that have raised fears of a racist killer on the loose.
Authorities said the same weapon, a powerful .45-caliber handgun, was used in two other recent shootings in southwestern France, also involving an assailant who fled by motorbike. Those attacks left three people dead - military paratroopers of North African and Caribbean origin.
The shootings echoed across a nation that has been focused on an upcoming presidential race in which issues about religious minorities and race have gained prominence. President Nicolas Sarkozy - facing a hard re-election battle - raised the terrorism alert level in the region to its highest level, while also noting a possible racist motive.
"This act is despicable, it cannot go unpunished," Sarkozy said in a prime-time address to the nation. "Each time this man acts, he acts to kill, giving his victims no chance."
Monday's attack was as quick and methodical as it was terrifying.
At around 8 a.m., with more than 100 students and other worshippers inside a synagogue adjoining the Ozar Hatorah school, the gunman coolly got off his motor scooter. He opened fire at 30-year-old Jonathan Sandler, a rabbi who taught at the school, and his sons, 4-year-old Gabriel and 5-year-old Arieh, while they waited for a bus to a Jewish primary school across town.
As the shots rang out, panicked students darted inside the school grounds and the attacker chased them, witnesses said. At one point, he grabbed the principal's 7-year-old daughter, Miriam Monsonego, by her hair, shot her in the head and fled.
Cries of, "There are shots! there are shots!" rang out in the synagogue, recalled a 29-year-old neighbor who gave only his first name, Baroukh. He said some children took refuge in a basement.
Nicole Yardeni, a local Jewish official who saw security video of the attack, described the shooter as "determined, athletic and well-toned." She said he wore a helmet with the visor down.
"You see a man park his motorcycle, start to shoot, enter the school grounds and chase children to catch one and shoot a bullet into her head," Yardeni said. "It's unbearable to watch and you can't watch anymore after that. He was looking to kill."
Toulouse Prosecutor Michel Valet said a 17-year-old boy was also seriously wounded.
"He shot at everything he had in front of him, children and adults," Valet said. "The children were chased inside the school."
All of the dead were dual Israeli-French citizens, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said. By 8 p.m., as a dozen police blocked access to the school, cries again echoed from within as community members mourned over the victims' bodies before they were to be flown to Israel for burial.
Authorities immediately increased security at schools and synagogues around the country. The attack revolted France, where school shootings are extremely rare, and drew strong condemnation from Israel and the United States.
France has suffered bouts of criminal anti-Semitism over the years, often targeting synagogues or Jewish cemeteries. Monday's slayings were the deadliest to target a Jewish site since Palestinian militants shot and killed six people in the popular Jo Goldenberg deli in Paris' Marais district in 1982.
Officials in France have been particularly sensitive toward the Jewish community because of the country's World War II past of abetting Nazi occupiers in deporting Jewish citizens.
Sarkozy and his main challenger, Socialist Francois Hollande, rushed to pay their respects in Toulouse. In Paris, Notre Dame Cathedral hosted a special Mass to honor the dead. Schools across the country planned a minute of silence in commemoration on Tuesday.
In France's increasingly tense and raucous race to the presidency, the subject of immigration - a buzzword that has often served as a cloak for racist sentiments - has taken a central role. Critics have accused Sarkozy of taking a hard-line tack on the issue to siphon off votes from the far right.
His conservative government was on the defensive on Monday, emphasizing their response since the first shootings on March 11.
Interior Minister Claude Gueant, a close Sarkozy ally, said some 200 investigators have been assigned to the cases, though there were "no clear leads" and it wasn't clear if the assailant was acting alone.
Sarkozy said 14 riot police units had been assigned to "secure the region as long as this criminal" remains at large. The terror level was raised to scarlet - the highest level since the four-point system was created in 2003.
In the wake of the shootings, the New York Police Department stepped up security at synagogues, and U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland condemned an "unprovoked and vicious act of violence" in France.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also condemned the attack.
"It's too early to say what the precise background for this act of murder is, but I think that we can't rule out that there was a strong, murderous anti-Semitic motive here," Netanyahu said.
A police official said the same .45-caliber handgun used in Monday's attack was used in the shootings four days earlier that killed two paratroopers and seriously injured a third in nearby Montauban, as well as an attack that killed a paratrooper eight days earlier in Toulouse.
In Monday's attack, the killer also used a .35-caliber gun, firing at least 15 shots at the school, police officials said.
"The shooter is someone used to holding weapons," said Nicolas Comte of the SGP FO police union. "He knows what he's doing, like an ex-military guy."
Sarkozy said that Monday's shootings and the earlier paratrooper killings appeared to be motivated by racism.
"Of course, by attacking children and a teacher who were Jewish, the anti-Semitic motivation appears obvious," Sarkozy said. "Regarding our soldiers, we can imagine that racism and murderous madness are in this case linked."
France is home to Western Europe's largest Jewish community, estimated at about 500,000, as well as its largest Muslim population - about 5 million.
Toulouse, a southwestern city north of the Pyrenees mountains, has about 10,000 to 15,000 Jews in its overall population of 440,000, said Jean-Paul Amoyelle, the president of the Ozar Hatorah school network in France. He said its Jewish community is well integrated into the city.
After Monday's shooting, six bullet holes pierced the high, white aluminum fence next to the school's entrance, at the spot where the rabbi and his sons were killed. One officer held a distraught girl, her face in her hands. A boy in a yarmulke and his mother walked away from the site, their faces visibly pained.
Corinne Tordjeman said she had just dropped off her 14-year-old son, Alexandre, when the gunman arrived. Her younger daughter was supposed to go to a birthday party this weekend with the girl who was killed.
The killer "knew that killing Jewish children would make a lot of noise, but tomorrow it could be a Christian, a Muslim, or anyone else," she said.
Baroukh said he had spoken to Sandler only moments before the attack.
"I said "Bonjour" to him like normal," he said. "Then he went out into the school entrance. I heard the shots and I turned around and saw him on the ground ... I panicked and started running away."


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Warning: If you haven't played Deus Ex, but have maybe bought it in a Steam Sale as something you're absolutely going to play one day, this article will drive a twelve-car train of spoilers through that dream like you're Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception.
This post originally appeared 8/5/14 on Kotaku UK.
A piece of driftwood internet wisdom that sometimes floats past on gaming messageboards goes something like this: every time you mention Deus Ex, someone will reinstall it. Somewhere, wheezing for breath under the clutter of my room/workspace/habitat, is my original Deus Ex CD-ROM, which I bought aged 12 on a whim with pocket money. My reasoning was solid: I'd never heard of the game, but the back of the box promised guns and conspiracies, and the dude on the front was rocking some dangerously cool shades. Little Me might not have known much about global banking conspiracies or the Trilateral Commission, but you could coax him onto the cyberpunk neo-anarchist bandwagon with a pair of polarised Wayfarers and a trench coat.
Fourteen years later, I've lost my fake RayBans and even the local Brixton drug dealers don't wear trench coats. Sunglasses at night went out with Corey Hart (or at least with Keanu Reeves). Deus Ex did indeed have guns, but even at the time they were inexcusably horrible to use. The game's not even a looker anymore – more a kind of papercraft tribute to how you think you remember it looked, with weirder walking animations.
So why do I go back to it? Because leaving aside its wackier conspiracy theories, it's the quality – the prescience – of Deus Ex's story that makes it such a great game to play in 2014 – in a horrible, unsettling sort of way. Revisit the game today and nano-augmented super-agent JC Denton's quest to unravel a global conspiracy doesn't seem twee or outdated. Somehow, it seems timely: moment after moment of sneering, political philosophising about money, health, corporations and the poor, punctuated by regular, 400-volt jolts of "wait, when was this written?"
Unlike the most recent instalment in the franchise – 2011's (great) Deus Ex: Human Revolution – the original Deus Ex doesn't drag you by the wrist right to the centre of its narrative. You aren't the bodyguard/confidant of a global leader in the human augmentation industry and your girlfriend isn't the brilliant, one-in-a-million scientist whose research holds the keys to the future of humanity's advancement. In DX1, you are, basically, a thug. A genetically engineered, laser-precise piece of next-gen thuggery, it's true – but a punchy cog in the wheel of big government nonetheless. Go here. Do that. Shoot them. Video game protagonist 101.
The set-up at the game's start deliberately plays on the unimpeachable FPS hero trope. Only if you slow down to read the game's scattered newspapers, public information terminals and hacked email accounts do you find out how rotten the world of Deus Ex really is, and that apple only decays further the deeper you burrow.
Your first mission ends with an interrogation with a captured terrorist leader. His group have stolen a shipment of vaccine (called Ambrosia) for a plague that's decimating all but the wealthiest in society (who can afford the cure). Your sole objective is to find out where the terrorists are taking it, so you can nab it back.
"Well done!" Your handler beams over your brain implant, once you do. "Report back to base. Mission complete."
But if you stay on after getting your answer, you can press the leader on his motives. What you get for your trouble could be an opinion column from a 2014 Sunday newspaper. This guy, who until 30 seconds ago was the target of an anti-terror raid (and who you can just waste in the head, if you feel like it, to the chagrin of your superiors), is suddenly flitting between Occupy movement rhetoric ("Ever wonder by the big car companies pay 2 per cent tax, while the guys on the assembly line pay 40 per cent?") and pro-Wikileaks soundbites ("Did you ever ask what it's for? The surveillance? The police? Is that freedom?"). Besides the boxy, 4:3 ratio TVs back at counter-terrorist HQ, there's not a thing in the thematic nature of DX1's opening mission that's aged a day.
"Regarding the 99 per cent [question], it's funny," says Deus Ex's lead writer, Sheldon Pacotti. "I guess I've always had a populist streak in me. I can't speak for the rest of the development team, but even before the economic shocks of the 2000s I was preoccupied with the smallness of individual people compared to modern companies and governments. It's hard to own your own career – and identity – when you often don't even see the faces of the people deciding whether or not your job exists. You're even more alienated when the 'decisions' are really just the result of impenetrably complex macro-economic processes. This vastness of scale is a direct outgrowth of technology".
The game's first big twist is that the National Secessionist Force (or NSF), which you've been bravely gun-plugging in the name of maintaining order, are actually the good guys: regular people pushed into fighting for their lives and livelihoods and then conveniently branded 'terrorists' by their government. The world that they live in is leaving them behind, as the rich pull away from the poor and employ people like you to police the divide.
As JC, you see both sides of the equation in the way that no other in-game characters do: the elite live in fancy apartments and mansions (which you break into and pillage for goodies), while New York is filled with the sick and the homeless - either living in crappy rented rooms in the dilapidated 'Ton Hotel, or in ragtag communities in abandoned subway stations. Deus Ex's augmentations (the biomechanical enhancements that give JC and other UNATCO agents their awesome, murderous powers (and the series' signature mechanics)) are huge technological advances. But the more you explore, the more you realise you're one of the chosen few who can enjoy them. These frightened, desperate people are being stacked against a Terminator. As the defenceless NSF leader puts it before he's carried off, never to be seen again: "Who's the scary one, huh? Me or you?"
One famous piece of trivia about Deus Ex is that, if you look at the city skyline during the missions set in New York City, the Twin Towers are conspicuously absent. The real reason for their exclusion isn't very interesting: something to do with memory constraints. So in the game's fiction, the Towers were destroyed by terrorists. Deus Ex was released in 2000, a year before 9/11.
But the game makes a more direct prediction about terrorism in the 21st Century in its first level, in which (before interrogating the NSF leader) JC is tasked with turfing the NSF out of the Statue of Liberty. The statue itself was destroyed previously in the game's fiction, losing its head and its torch. But the group responsible are domestic terrorists, and the attack therefore a symbolic one: in Deus Ex's world, the American people feel they're now subjects of a wealthy and corrupt elite working against the interests of the common man. Politicians and their families get plague vaccine while their own loved ones die in gutters. 'Liberty' is just a statue.
"I think the game's most accurate prediction comes in how terrorism operates in the story", says Pacotti. "From the mission ideas to the way characters strategise and explain themselves, the game dramatises the idea that 21st century war will be waged with symbolic acts. Before September 11th, though terrorism was prominent in the news, the notion that terrorists would destroy a major landmark like the Statue of Liberty seemed far-fetched, but now it's clear that modern wars are TV shows where both sides compete to write the script. PR has always been a part of war, but 24-hour news and the internet has made it almost the primary battlefield."
The responses of the powers-that-be to the threat of terrorism in the first Deus Ex are also eerily prescient, especially in their dehumanisation of the enemy. For the first chunk of the game, JC works as an agent for the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition (UNATCO). Although you can choose to play a stealthy, non-lethal character, if you go soft on UNATCO's enemies, the veteran field agents will chew you out and question whether you've really got the stones for the job.
"The terrorists have wired the platform with explosives and put in hostages", says your sometime-mentor, Anna Navarre, of an NSF group who have barricaded a subway station. "Get the hostages out if you can, but make sure the NSF learn that human shields will not work against UNATCO".
UNATCO HQ is a house divided. You're free to talk to the secondary characters whom work there between missions. General Sam Carter, a war veteran, runs the armoury. He's not happy with the way UNATCO's mission is being handled by the higher-ups, but affirms that the majority of people working in the building – the civilian staffers and the boots-on-the-ground – are "24-carat gold".
Wander down to UNATCO's bottom level, however, and you'll find the holding cells; several hold NSF prisoners. You're forbidden to talk to them (though you can), and later, one of the game's primary antagonists (a shady government higher-up) arrives to conduct the interrogations personally. Follow him surreptitiously to the cells and you can watch his 'interrogation' of the captives – who are, it's made clear, US citizens with families. The interrogation begins with carrots, moves on to sticks, and ends with murder. The government representative coldly rationalises his actions as "responding to a threat". The doctrine of the Bush and Cheney administration is carved deep into the foundations of UNATCO HQ.
"We may not have the premeditated lies of Deus Ex, but we do see extraordinary feats of storytelling when governments overstep or mis-step", says Pacotti. "To me, at least, some of the malaise of the Deux Ex dystopia has been present during the years after 9/11, during which torture, mass surveillance of civilians, and disregard for due process have all been touted as necessary for fighting terrorists. It's the story of totalitarianism nicely wordsmithed by the West and provided free of charge back to the rest of the world".
But if its treatise on terrorism was Deus Ex predicting the 2000s, maybe the best measure of how much times have changed since the game's original release is the fact that mass surveillance of a civilian population, while a fact of life in the game's universe, doesn't even earn the honour of being a major plot point. It's almost relegated to a lone (if chilling) Easter Egg, a hidden encounter that is easy to miss altogether if you aren't actively looking for it.
About midway through the game, JC finds himself quasi-abducted and wakes up in the secret mansion of Illuminatus Morgan Everett. It's one of Deus Ex's many non-combat moments. JC's objectives are to meet Everett, learn about the Illuminati's plans for the world, then meet his pilot Jock at the helipad so that he can fly off to his next mission. But if you decide post-meeting that you'd rather take five to do some snooping, you might discover the code to an otherwise impregnable blast door. Behind it sits a computer running an artificial intelligence named Morpheus.
Morpheus, as it explains itself to JC, is a retired prototype for part of the ECHELON network: a gigantic, automated spying system built to intercept and analyse phone conversations, emails, faxes and other forms of communication from around the world. In the game, Morpheus has since been replaced by more advanced AIs (Daedalus, Icarus and possibly Oracle). Now it is kept by Everett as a techno-curiosity to amuse house guests. Its party trick is telling people their life stories, harvested from the digital footprints they leave online.
"Human beings feel pleasure while they are watched," it says, without emotion. "I have recorded their smiles as I tell them who they are".
"Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance", JC replies.
This unhappy piece of future-gazing was written at the end of the '90s, before Facebook, before Twitter, before smartphone apps that recorded your movements via GPS with your one-tap consent. More unsettlingly, Morpheus dismisses JC's cynical response ("no-one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera") as naive, positing that "the need to be observed was once satisfied by God" and that "the human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame: the observation and judgement of others".
That's Morpheus, a fictional artificial intelligence, predicting the web-born mentality that drives Facebook-stalking and pushed the Mail Online to become the most viewed online newspaper in the world, off the back of stories about D-List celebrity affairs and cellulite.
"In the Morpheus conversation, though I personally had no inkling that something like Facebook was on the horizon, I started seeing a very clear personal connection between human beings and the 'data mining' of the [Morpheus] AI", says Pacotti. "I think there is this fundamental human need to be known, understood, and therefore assigned a proper place. Even among a group of teenagers on Facebook, this involves a certain ceding of power, whether to a group of peers or to our software overlords".
If this article had been written ten years ago, it would have been about war and the lengths that a hypothetical future government might go to in the nominal defence of the Homeland. Deus Ex would still have been ahead of its time, but rooted in the physical and segregated from the life of the average citizen; we'd be talking about the military augmentation of soldiers through the Future Soldier programme or the abuse of captured enemy combatants and illegal rendition, not mass surveillance and the individual right to privacy.
But even after Guantanomo failed to close, even after the term 'Black Site' entered the vernacular and can now be bandied around in TV shows like Homeland and The Blacklist without making us sick, Deus Ex's other themes remain salient. The hero facing off against the corrupt heads of the serpent with Plasma Rifles and GEP Guns is still good video game gloss, but the backing music – the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor, the distrust of the government – resonates more than ever. So what has changed in the 14 year interim? What would Deus Ex have looked like if it had been made today?
"Nothing is quite right about the world of Deus Ex", says Pacotti. "Like all fiction, the gameworld is prone to exaggeration – from the luridness of cybernetic implants to the fierceness of laboratory mutants – but when I try to put my finger on something that is dead wrong, I have a hard time.
"One issue that occupies more of my attention these days is the falling economic worth of human beings. Globalisation simply continues industry's search for cheap resources and cheap labour, as disruptive as it may seem in the West – and might well work its mischief long before the timeframe of Deus Ex. The more apocalyptic change is automation. The middle class is disappearing because mediocre human intellects, which previously could be effective at organising, say, a filing cabinet, simply don't 'add value' where they used to. The conspirators of a re-imagined Deus Ex would need to be more cognisant of this shift, I think.
"The tone of [the game's] idea – a [domestic] armed uprising in the US – doesn't feel quite right today, yet all of the same tensions are present. Accusations of a conspiracy between big business and government, anger at the US allowing itself to be led by other countries, severe wealth disparity, armed standoffs between ranchers and the government, secession movements (like the recent one on Colorado)... A slight shift of focus, and the future could still turn out like Deus Ex after all".
This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK, bringing you original reporting, game culture and humour with a U from the British isles. Follow them on @Kotaku_UK.


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Reader Interactions
9 Responses to "Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick""
Thanks! This is a great resource!
Holy cow!!! What a great site! Way to go and keep it up!
I have a yet another question.
In the above article you discuss various myths associated with the "hockey stick" graph. To support your argument you refer to other sources. For example "see Cook et al 2004" at the end of the myth 1 discussion. So I thought – ok, I'll look up the Cook study and see what it says. Now unfortunately I'm a total non-expert – I only started reading about climate change a few months ago, so it always possible that I've misunderstood something. Anyway as I was reading the paper it struck me that neither the Cook study – nor any of the other proxy studies were in total agreement with the hockey stick.
[Response: Your comment is somewhat incorrectly premised. There is no uniquely defined 'hockey stick' reconstruction. This term, as defined in our glossary, refers to the general shape, common to a number of independent reconstructions (see this comparison of various proxy- and model-based estimates), characterized by 20th century large-scale warming that exceeds the bounds of the more moderate temperature variations characterizing preceding centuries. The details of any individual reconstruction depend, however, on the regions and seasons represented by that particular reconstruction, as discussed above in the discussion of "myth #1". In the Cook et al (2004) paper referred to above, the authors are indeed careful to emphasise that their conclusions pertain to the warm-season and extratropical, continental region represented by their particular reconstruction. There are a number of important reasons why reconstructions differ depending on seasonal and spatial sampling considerations (see the response to comment#3 above, and also the discussion in the review paper by Jones and Mann (2004–see section 5.3 therein) [Jones, P.D., Mann, M.E., Climate Over Past Millennia, Reviews of Geophysics, 42, RG2002, doi: 10.1029/2003RG000143, 2004.]. It is therefore not surprising that past summer, extratropical temperature changes, such as are reconstructed by Esper et al (2002) and Cook et al (2004), may indeed have differed significantly from annual temperature changes over the entire (tropical and extratropical) Northern Hemisphere, such as are targeted in other reconstructions (e.g. Jones et al, 1998; Mann et al, 1999; Crowley and Lowery, 2000; Mann and Jones, 2003). Despite these differences in seasonal and spatial emphasis, however, the various reconstructions and model estimates are in fact observed to be consistent within estimated uncertainties. -mike]
You could argue that all the reconstructions show some agreement up to about 1980 – but after that the measured temperature record diverges completely from the proxy records and by the end of the century appears to be at least 0.3 degrees higher than the proxies.
[Response: This is not correct. Most reconstructions only extend through about 1980 because the vast majority of tree-ring, coral, and ice core records currently available in the public domain do not extend into the most recent decades. While paleoclimatologists are attempting to update many important proxy records to the present, this is a costly, and labor-intensive activity, often requiring expensive field campaigns that involve traveling with heavy equipment to difficult-to-reach locations (such as high-elevation or remote polar sites). For historical reasons, many of the important records were obtained in the 1970s and 1980s and have yet to be updated. The fact that a relatively small number of long high-resolution proxy temperature records extend through the most recent decades should not be mis-interpreted as evidence against recent warming (as sometimes done by certain contrarians). The available long records that extend through the present typically do indeed confirm the recent warming. For example, through a composite of the relatively few very long available proxy records that extend all the way through the 1990s, Jones and Mann (2004) show that proxy-reconstructed Northern Hemisphere temperatures [navy blue curve in Figure 2 here, do indeed reproduce the post-1980 warming indicated by the instrumental record (red curve in same figure). -mike]
As I say I thought this was down to me as I hadn't seen anything – even in sceptic articles which mentioned this. However towards the end of the paper, it refers to the difference between the Cook (or Esper) reconstruction and the observed temperature, saying
"Note that it does very well at tracking the instrumental data on inter-decadal and longer tinescales up to about 1982, after which the tree-ring estimates systematically under-estimate the actual warming. "
There are probably several possibilities for this, but the two most obvious would be
1. The Surface Temperature is wrong – at least after 1980 or
2. The proxy measurements do not accurately reflect true temperature, i.e. there is a
'damping' effect.
[Response: This comment again reflects some degree of misunderstanding regarding what the proxy reconstructions and instrumental data actually show. There is no discrepancy in general between the 20th century trends indicating by the instrumental record and by most proxy reconstructions. In some tree-ring reconstructions (particularly, those based on tree-ring density information, and emphasising higher latitudes), however, anomalous behavior in recent decades apparently related to non-climatic (or, at least, non-temperature related) influences on tree growth does indeed compromise the use of these data in reconstructing temperature changes over the past several decades [see e.g. the discussions by Briffa et al (1998)[Briffa et al, Reduced sensitivity of recent tree-growth to temperature at high northern latitudes, Nature, 391, 678 – 682 (1998)] and also this article in Eos by Mann et al (2003)[Mann, M.E., Ammann, C.M., Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Crowley, T.J., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D., Oppenheimer, M., Osborn, T.J., Overpeck, J. T., Rutherford, S., Trenberth, K.E., Wigley, T.M.L., Response to Comment on 'On Past Temperatures and Anomalous Late 20th Century Warmth', Eos, 84, 473, 2003]. The same factors may compromise the behavior of the Esper et al (2002)/Cook et al (2004) reconstructions in recent decades as well. These factors, however, do not appear to be relevant to other, multiple-proxy based reconstructions such as those referred to above. -mike]
Whatever the reason for the divergence, it would seem to suggest that the practice of grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record – as I believe was done in the case of the 'hockey stick' – is dubious to say the least.
[Response: No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, "grafted the thermometer record onto" any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum. Most proxy reconstructions end somewhere around 1980, for the reasons discussed above. Often, as in the comparisons we show on this site, the instrumental record (which extends to present) is shown along with the reconstructions, and clearly distinguished from them (e.g. highlighted in red as here). Most studies seek to "validate" a reconstruction by showing that it independently reproduces instrumental estimates (e.g. early temperature data available during the 18th and 19th century) that were not used to 'calibrate' the proxy data. When this is done, it is indeed possible to quantitatively compare the instrumental record of the past few decades with earlier estimates from the proxy reconstruction, within the context of the estimated uncertainties in the reconstructed values (again see the comparisons here, with the instrumental record clearly distinguished in red, the proxy reconstructions indicated by e.g. blue or green, and the uncertainties indicated by shading). -mike]
Have you any comments on this?
[Response: See above. -mike]
In your responses above, you say
"Most proxy reconstructions end somewhere around 1980, for the reasons discussed above…."
Then why does the Cook paper comment on the "under-estimation of actual warming after 1982". There is a graph (at the top of Page 2) which shows the proxy reconstructions extending well beyond 1980. I have just looked at the Briffa study (also referenced by yourselves) which also shows reconstructions beyond 1980.
[Response: Please carefully read the response to your previous post. Further information is provided in the Jones and Mann (2004) review paper, which is linked to above. Unfortunately, due to other demands on our time, this will have to be the last word on the matter for the present. -mike]
You also say
"While paleoclimatologists are attempting to update many important proxy records to the present, this is a costly, and labor-intensive activity…."
While this may be true I would have thought that this would be seen as a major priority in order to provide confirmation and validation of the surface temperature record. After all, this is the period which is supposed to show 'unprecedented' warming surely it's necessary to obtain as much evidence as possible to confirm this.
There doesn't seem to be the same problems when it comes to validating (or not) the UAH satellite record.
I accept you know longer wish to discuss this but I would like to comment on part of your previous responses where you say
"…however, anomalous behavior in recent decades apparently related to non-climatic (or, at least, non-temperature related) influences on tree growth does indeed compromise the use of these data in reconstructing temperature changes over the past several decades"
This seems like incredible bad luck. Here we have a perfectly reliable method for reconstructing past temperatures over hundreds of years – then all of a sudden there is "anomalous behavior in recent decades apparently related to non-climatic (or, at least, non-temperature related) influences on tree growth". And wouldn't you know it – this anamalous behaviour coincides exactly with a period of 'unprecedented' warming.
[Response: These are exactly the types of issues that paleoclimatologists worry about, and spend a great bit of time attempting to deal with. The phenomenon in question gets at the issue of "uniformitarianism" that is that the heart of proxy methods for reconstructing past climates. Proxy-specific biases are, for example, one argument in favor of the use of multiple proxy indicators in reconstructing past climates. A good discussion of all of these issues can be found in the Jones and Mann (2004) review paper referred to in comment #4 above. I hope you find this reference of some help in answering other questions you may have.]
"Myth #0" added 12/23/04 -mike
Well, if nothing else, the perturbation of atmosphere and water supplies have certainly been a lot greater in the last 20-50 years than previously. So, as we were saying, we do know that atmospheric composition or the trace gases (everything but O2, N2 and maybe Ar) has changed rapidly in the past half century, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. OTOH, unless you have some information not available to me, these have been relatively stable pre 1900 back at least a few millenia, at least in comparison with recent times.
So why are you surprised that tree growth patterns have altered lately and what would you attribute this to? We do know that northern forests, for example, have been affected by sulphate emissions. I would regard this not as an indicator that the proxy records have been falsified, but that anthropic effects are clearly visible in the recent records.
When Climatologists Attack!!
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[…] 5. A detailed, annotated response to the criticism of this data posted on realclimate.org […]