#it might not be 100% same here in Pakistan but i do think the basic rules are the same

[badedramay]

I would like your thoughts on something..... everyone is hyping Hamza Sohail to the 7th heaven because of his performance in ft including various portals (which have sidelined sehar completely). I don't want to get into whether or not he's a good performer (I have some thoughts but ya nvm). However, I do think Sehar has a lot of potential but I also noticed that she's not from the same elite background and rest of the ft cast (adnan lol, aena, amna and hamza) so I was wondering whether she will benefit from this show like the others (tvcs, brands, shoots etc) or whether she would get sidelined because of her background? What are her chances of succeeding (ik it's subjective but asking anyway) in this industry in the long term?

okay first off I don't think Sehar Khan is someone one should take "halka". Fairytale might be her breakthrough role on social media but this girl has been part of hit dramas before it. Geo dramas? they have VIEWS. they have an audience that is hooked to them. and it's the audience that actually makes the PH money. Sehar is a known face to THEM. critics and twtawaam didn't watch it people watched Rang Mahal and Farq. she is a 7th Sky Productions ki leading lady. this girl might not be from an elite background (idk i don't know about her background at all) but she has blessings from inarguably the biggest PH of the PakDrama industry right now. so, success? she has that. she has tasted that already. FT gave her the attention of the more "cooler" part of the online fandom which is always the smaller percentage.

what she doesn't have is the right management. where Hamza wins either due to his connections or background or whatever and Sehar loses is that Hamza is being handled by a management that is making the right calls at the right time. I always believe there's a small window of chance that an actor gets after their projects becomes a success where they get to leverage their success to be part of bigger brand deals. i dont think companies are foolish enough to not take on any celeb that's currently having a successful project solely because of what their background is. if the celeb's current image aligns with the company's philosophy or the product, the companies are fine with it. at the end of the day it's all business. jo dikhta woh bikta hai. Hamza's management KNOWS that and is doing that for him. the teaser for his campaign for Republic just released and Republic is a big brand. I doubt he got it solely cuz of his surname. i bet his management made the right calls and warmed up the brand to Hamza which got him that deal. yes of course some form of favoritism might be at play here but all of this cannot be attributed to it.

in very rare cases does a company chase a celeb. it's almost always the other way around. and these things are handled by the management. it's a management's literal job to make sure the celeb they are handling are in the right books of the right companies at the right time. actors don't sit around keeping tabs on which company is looking for what? the management does either on their own or by the actor's specific request. in cases like FT where a pairing becomes a success, it then becomes both the actors' joint efforts and wishes if they want to further cash in on that. just take any brand or magazine photoshoot after a pairing became a success in the past. I am sure that happened because both the parties involved were offered such terms that were acceptable for both their managements so the deal was signed. maybe in Hamza/Sehar case..Sehar's management has different plans for Sehar and Hamza's management has different. it's clear that at least from Hamza's side they are not interested in solely riding on the "Farmeed" wave. they want to establish Hamza as a solo hero and it's shown in the kind of exposure he's getting and the deals he is signing. ab either Sehar's management isn't making enough efforts to get a joint deal that is favorable to both of them or maybe the lack of effort is from Hamza's part..the point I am trying to say is that things behind the scene work a lot more differently than how a normal audience assumes it does.

(some points i couldn't fit in anywhere above)

agar background hi sab kuch hota toh Adnan would be doing Republic, not Hamza.

it took Ahad and Ramsha a year after Hum Tum to do their first tvc together while Sahad had multiple tvcs on air while their projects were onair. the latter had the same management goals while the former didn't.

does anyone remember the Lipton TVC Maya, Hamza, and Aisha had done during peak Mann Mayal success days?? that's using the small window of opportunity at the right time when a project is successful.

i bettttttttt Wahaj is being chased by many more brands but his management is making sure to keeping him aligned with brands that are either of better standard or contribute to his image of being a "hero".

similarly Yumna must also be chased by brands but i think since she has a very strict image that she wants to stick to no matter what..she might have turned down a few deals that she feels won't align with that.

I don't remember Maya having ever done a tvc where she's a mother? you know the baby ka doodh and baby ke diaper type ads. cuz they don't align with the image she likes to maintain.

baat itni hai ke kitna brand aapko kitna paisa deta hai. deal achi honi chaiye phir toh Mahirah bhi washing powder ke ishtehaar mein naachi thi.

Obi's supreme tvc has a very progressive messaging behind it aligning with his own feminist philosophy. so yeah again..image of a celeb aligning with the brand/product's philosophy. a feroze khan wouldn't have fit that tvc let's be real.

haan abhi ke liye yehi bohat hai.

#did i even make sense here?? #industry affairs #sehar khan #hamza sohail #this isn't some inside knowledge i have btw #just knowledge i have gained over the years of consuming this stuff and keeping an interest in how these things happen #also meri apni critical thinking jo bass yaheen chalti hai aur kahin nahin #and idk whyyyy i want to suggest it but watch Call My Agent (the original French one its on Netflix) #to have an idea about the role managers play in the career of the talents they handle #it might not be 100% same here in Pakistan but i do think the basic rules are the same

[natiathere]

I want to preface this by saying that I literally just want to understand and learn more but as an Italian mixed girl/woman I don’t really know who to ask/ who to have this conversation with.... Having been in the kpop fandom since 2012 and growing up with no father I had to look up and educate myself as much as possible about cultural appropriation vs. Cultural appreciation and although I like to think I have the basic structure and differences down I’m still struggling with some aspects.

1)why are mixed people (especially girls) getting clowned a lot (especially on Tiktok)for having a white mother and a black father? Are we doing anything wrong and we are not aware of it? I mean, is not like we could choose who conceived us...

2) Although I understand that proving that “white culture” exists is oftentimes used to discredit and disregard “black culture”, as a European I feel kind of disrespected when it is claimed that white people don’t have a culture because while it is true that exhibit A is “italian culture”, exhibit B is “French culture” etc.. there are a lot of instances where “white culture has been a thing (for example in art there are some movements that are inherently European, in cuisines as Europeans we have a lot more similarities if we look for it or in languages or literature)

3) Relating to the second point, I don’t understand why we can’t talk about “Asian culture” ( I used Asian culture as an example because I’ve never heard anyone talk about it and it has more distinguishable features, I’m including India and Pakistan and other countries like Kazakistan)in the same way as “black culture”. This stems from the fact that from what I’ve gathered (and I repeat I am sure I might be 100% wrong) black culture has almost nothing to do with African culture since it stemmed from being enslaved and brought to another country against their will. So it is more so of a mixture of traditions that come together and with time came to inglobate some aspects of American culture as well. My main questions here are “what are the criteria for defining a culture?” And “why didn’t we start talking about geographical areas in culture?”

I really just want to know so please be gentle with me and explain things to me like you would with a child (I don’t think I’m very bright 👀🥲)

#cultural appropriation #culture #help ya girl out #please discuss #understanding

[patriotsnet]

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-republicans-riot-after-obama-was-elected/

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

Undocumented Kids Are Saved By Obamas Executive Order Daca Which Would Put A Halt To Deportation For Those Whod Entered The Country Before Age 16 And Yet In A Bid To Get The Gop To Come Over To His Side On Immigration Reform The President Has Also Deported A Record 15 Million People In His First Term

A Family Caught in Immigration Limbo

When Belsy Garcia saw her mother’s number appear on her iPhone on the afternoon of June 15, she felt what she calls the “uncomfortable fluttering” sensation in her chest. She knew that daytime calls signaled an emergency. The worst one had come the previous year, when her sister told her ICE agents had placed their father in federal custody.

Garcia was attending Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, when her father was marched out of her childhood home. As an undocumented immigrant — like both of her parents, who are from Guatemala — she couldn’t qualify for loans. She financed her ­education through scholarships and a stipend she earned as a residential assistant. Now she wondered if her mother was calling to say her father had been deported, which might force her to leave school to become the family’s breadwinner.

But this call was different. “Go turn on the television,” Garcia’s mother said. “You’re going to be able to work, get a driver’s license.”

Onscreen, President Obama was announcing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the United States as children could apply for Social Security numbers and work permits. Garcia qualified: Her parents had brought her to this country when she was 7 years old. DACA transformed her into a premed student who could actually become a doctor. “It was like this weight was lifted,” she says. “All of that hard work was going to pay off.”

In The Next Hundred Days Our Bipartisan Outreach Will Be So Successful That Even John Boehner Will Consider Becoming A Democrat After All We Have A Lot In Common He Is A Person Of Color Although Not A Color That Appears In The Natural World Whats Up John Barack Obama White House Correspondents Dinner

And Then There Were Three

The first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court did so in 1880. It would take another 101 years for a woman to sit on that bench rather than stand before it. Even then, progress was fitful. Over the 12 years that Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg served together, their identities evidently merged; lawyers regularly addressed Ginsburg as “Justice O’Connor.” When O’Connor retired in 2006, she left the faux Justice O’Connor feeling lonely. Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned of something far more alarming: What the public saw on entering the court were “eight men of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side.” They might well represent the most eminent legal minds in America. But there was something antiquated, practically mutton-choppy, about that portrait.

How many female justices would be sufficient? Nine, says Justice Ginsburg, noting that no one ever raised an eyebrow at the idea of nine men.

Seal Team Six Kills Osama Bin Ladenraiding His Secret Compound In Abbottabad Pakistan While Obama And His Top Advisers Watch A Live Feed Of The Mission From The White House Situation Room The Picture Of The Assembled Becomes The Last Supper Of The Obama Era

Poop Feminism

For me, it’s one moment. All the bridesmaids have come to the fancy bridal shop to see Maya Rudolph try on wedding dresses. This should be a familiar scene: The bride emerges from the changing room and … This is the dress! The friends clap. The mother cries. Everyone is a princess. Go ahead and twirl!

But when the bride emerges in Bridesmaids, almost all of her friends have started to feel sick. Sweat coats their skin. Red splotches creep over their faces. They try to “ooh” and “aah,” but it’s already too late. It starts with a gag from Melissa McCarthy, followed by another gag. Then a gag that comes simultaneously with a tiny wet fart. It’s the smallness of the fart that’s important here. It’s the kind of fart that slips out — a fart that could be excused away, a brief, incongruous accident. Women don’t fart in wedding movies, and women certainly don’t fart at the exact moment that the bride comes out in her dress. This can’t be happening. ­Melissa McCarthy blames the fart on the tightness of her dress. We breathe a sigh of relief.

Then sweet Ellie Kemper gags, and the sound effect is surprisingly nasty. Ellie’s face is gray. Melissa’s face is red. They look bad. They are embarrassed. How far is this going to go?

The camera cuts. We are above now. We look down from a safe perch as the release we have been anticipating and dreading begins. It is horribly, earth-­shatteringly gross. A woman has just pooped in a sink. The revolution has begun.

The Government Acquires A 61 Percent Stake In Gm And Loans The Company $50 Billion The Auto Bailout Will Eventually Be Heralded As A Great Success Adding More Than 250000 Manufacturing Jobs To The Economy

The Auto Industry Gets Rerouted

“The president was very clear with us that he only wanted to do stuff that would fundamentally change the way they did business. And that’s what we did. There were enormous changes. For example, General Motors had something like 300 different job classifications that the union had. If you were assigned to put the windshield wipers on, you couldn’t put tires on. And we wiped all that stuff out. We basically gave back management the freedom to manage, to hire, to fire. People stopped getting paid even when they were on layoff. We reduced the number of car plants so that there wasn’t so much overcapacity. So now, when you have 16 million cars sold , they’re making a fortune.”

Black Lives Matter Activists Are Arrested In Baton Rouge Louisianaprotesting The Murder Of Alton Sterling; More Than 100 People Are Detained In St Paul Minnesota Protesting The Murder Of Philando Castile

What Is the Point of a Quantified Self?

Melissa Dahl: The Fitbit was introduced at a tech conference eight years ago. It’s kind of incredible to realize that, before then, this idea of the “quantified self” didn’t really exist in the mainstream.

Jesse Singal: I feel like it’s the intersection of all these different trends: Everyone plays video games these days. You got smartphones everywhere. And people are realizing that solutions to the big problems that lead to sleeplessness and anxiety and bad eating — unemployment and income inequality and yada yada yada — aren’t gonna get solved anytime soon.

MD: That’s interesting, because all of this self-tracking is also, according to some physicians, giving people more anxiety! A Fitbit-induced stress vortex.

Cari Romm: It feels like productive stress, though. I’m talking as a recovered Fitbit obsessive, but it does make you look at Fitbit-less people like, “You mean you don’t care how many steps you took today?”

MD: Oh, God. I don’t care. Should I care? Sleep is the one thing I obsessed over for a while. Which does not really help one get to sleep.

JS: Do you think an actually good and not obsession-­inducing sleep app could help, though?

MD: There’s some aspect to the tracking idea that really does work. I mean, it’s just a higher-tech version of a food journal or sleep journal, right? Ben Franklin 300 years ago was tracking his 13 “personal virtues” in his diary.

JS: Would Ben Franklin have been an insufferable tech-bro?

Officer Darren Wilson Fatally Shoots Michael Brownin The St Louis Suburb Of Ferguson Sparking A National Protest Movement And Setting Off Unrest That Will Remain Unresolved Two Years Later

On the Triumph of Black Culture in the Age of Police Shootings

In the two years since Mike Brown was fatally shot by the police in Ferguson, and the video footage of his dead body in the street went viral, we have seen the emergence of a perverse dichotomy on our screens and in our public discourse: irrefutable evidence of grotesquely persistent racism, and irrefutable evidence of increasing black cultural and political power. This paradox is not entirely new, of course — America was built on a narrative of white supremacy, and black Americans have simultaneously continued to make vast and essential contributions to the country’s prominence—but it has become especially pronounced. And it’s not just because of the internet and social media, or the leftward shift of the culture, or black America’s being sick and tired of being sick and tired. In fact, it is all of these things, not least two terms with a black president. In the same way that black skin signals danger to the police , his black skin, to black people, signaled black cultural preservation. African-Americans didn’t see a black man as the most powerful leader in the free world; we saw the most powerful leader in the free world as black. This is what comedian Larry Wilmore was expressing at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he said, “Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga.” It was a moment of unadulterated black pride.

Militants Attack American Compounds In Benghazi Libya Killing Us Ambassador Chris Stevens And Three Other Americans There Will Eventually Be Eight Congressional Probes Into The Incident

“I Know I Let Everybody Down”

“Before the debate, David Plouffe and I went in to talk to him and give him a pep talk and he said, ‘Let’s just get this over with and get out of here,’ which is not what you want to hear from your candidate right before the debate. We knew within ten minutes that it was going to be a ­debacle. We had armed him with a joke — it was his 20th anniversary, and he addressed Michelle — and it turns out Romney was expecting just such a line and had a really great comeback. And Romney was excellent — just free and easy and clearly well prepared and showed personality that people hadn’t seen before. Obama looked like he was at a press conference.

We had a meeting at the White House and he said, ‘I know I let everybody down and that’s on me, and I’m not going to let that happen again,’ and that was his attitude. We always had debate camps before, where we’d re-create in hotel ballrooms what the set would look like, and all of the conditions of the real debate. When we went down to Williamsburg, Virginia, for the next debate camp, he seemed really eager to engage in the prep. We had a decent first night. That was on Saturday. On Sunday night, Kerry, playing Romney, got a little more aggressive and Obama a little less so; it looked very much like what we had seen in Denver. It was like he’d taken a step back.

Scott Brown Is Elected Massachusetts Senatorturning Ted Kennedys Seat Republican For The First Time Since 1952 And Suddenly Throwing The Prospect Of Passing Obamacare Into Jeopardy

Plan B

“I’m talking to Rahm and Jim Messina and saying, ‘Okay, explain to me how this happened.’ It was at that point that I learned that our candidate, Martha Coakley, had asked rhetorically, ‘What should I do, stand in front of Fenway and shake hands with voters?’ And we figured that wasn’t a good bellwether of how things might go.

This might have been a day or two before the election, but the point is: There is no doubt that we did not stay on top of that the way we needed to. This underscored a failing in my first year, which was the sort of perverse faith in good policy leading to good politics. I’ll cut myself some slack — we had a lot to do, and every day we were thinking, Are the banks going to collapse? Is the auto industry going to collapse? Will layoffs accelerate? We just didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics that first year, and the loss in Massachusetts reminded me of what any good president or elected official needs to understand: You’ve got to pay attention to public opinion, and you have to be able to communicate your ideas. But it happened, and the question then was, ‘What’s next?’

Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In Hits Bookstores Making The Feminist Case That Women Should Be More Aggressive And Ambitious In Their Careers And Making Feminists Themselves Very Angry

The “Mommy Wars” Finally Flame Out

After decades of chilly backlash, we find ourselves, these past eight years, in an age of feminist resurgence, with feminist websites and publications and filmmakers and T-shirts and pop singers and male celebrities and best-selling authors and women’s soccer teams. Of course, as in every feminist golden age, there has also been dissent: furious clashes over the direction and quality of the discourse, especially as the movement has become increasingly trendy, shiny, and celebrity-backed.

Perhaps the most public feminist conflagration of the Obama years came at the nexus of policy and celebrity, of politics and pop power. It was the furor over Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who gave a viral 2010 TED Talk about women in the workplace who “leave before they leave” — who alter their professional strategy to accommodate a future they assume will be compromised by parenthood — which led to the publication of her 2013 feminist business manifesto, Lean In.

It’s a lesson of the Obama era: One approach to redressing inequality does not have to blot out the others. Sometimes, attacking from all angles is the most effective strategy.

Texas State Senator Wendy Davis Laces Up Her Pink Running Shoes And Spends Ten Long Hours Attempting To Filibuster A Billthat Wouldve Imposed Statewide Abortion Restrictions

“The Concept of Dignity Really Matters”

“I was given an enormous degree of latitude. I did communicate with the White House counsel on occasion about high-profile cases, but it was much more in the nature of just giving them a heads-up, to calm any nervous feelings they might have. There’s only one exception to that, and it was on marriage equality, in the Hollingsworth v. Perry case in 2013. We were contemplating coming in and arguing that it was unconstitutional for California to refuse to recognize the legal validity of same-sex marriages. But we didn’t have to do it . And because it was a discretionary judgment, and it was such a consequential step, that was the one matter where I really sought out the president’s personal guidance. I wanted to make sure the president had a chance to thoroughly consider what we should do before we did it. It was really one of the high points of my tenure. It was a wide-ranging conversation about doctrinal analysis, about where society was now, about social change and whether it should go through the courts or through the majoritarian process, about the pace of social change, about the significance of the right at stake. He was incredibly impressive.

A Golf Summit Between John Boehner And Barack Obama Stirs Hopethat Perhaps The Two Parties Will Come To A Budget Agreement And Forestall A True Crisis Secret And Semi

A Grand Bargain That Wasn’t, Remembered Three Ways

“The president of the United States and the Speaker of the House, the two most powerful elected officials in Washington, decided in a conversation that they both had to try to make something happen. Maybe it would be the way it worked in a West Wing episode in a world that doesn’t work like a West Wing episode. That’s how it started — two individuals saying we’re going to try. I think they both shared a belief in the art of the possible, and they both did not think compromise was a dirty word.

When our cover was blown — a Wall Street Journal editorial came out saying that Boehner and Obama were working on this and attacking the whole premise — that was devastating. It resulted in Cantor being a part of the talks. Cantor and Boehner came in, and I think it was a weekend private session with the president in the Oval Office, and they were talking about the numbers. At one point Cantor said, ‘Listen, it’s not just the numbers. There’s concern that this will help you politically. Paul Ryan said if we do this deal, it will guarantee your reelection. If we agree with Barack Obama on spending and taxes, that takes away one of our big weapons.’ There were so many obstacles, some of them substantive — how much revenue, and what about the entitlements? — but there was also this overlay of ‘This is going to help Obama.’

Illustrations by Lauren Tamaki

The Obama Administration Unveils Its Plan For Regulating Wall Streetwhich Is Then Introduced In Congress By Senator Chris Dodd And Representative Barney Frank

MJ=JC?

Lane Brown: Michael Jackson’s death was a big deal for lots of obvious reasons, including the surprising way it happened and the fact that he was arguably the most famous person on the planet.

Nate Jones: He was an A-lister with an indisputable body of work; he was 50 years old, his hits were the right age — old enough that every generation knew them, but not too old that they weren’t relevant anymore.

LB: But it was also the first huge celebrity death to happen in the age of social media, or at least the age of Twitter.

NJ: MJ’s death came alongside the protests in Iran, which was when Twitter went mainstream.

LB: It also meant that so much of the instant reaction was to make it all about us.

Frank Guan: In a lot of ways, the culture prefers the death of artists to their continuing to live. Once an artist gets launched into the stratosphere, there’s no way to come down, and that permanence becomes monotonous. They run out of timely or groundbreaking material and the audience starts tuning out. At some point, their fame eclipses their art, and then the only way to get the general audience to appreciate them anew is for them to die.

LB: People seem to like the grieving process so much that even lesser celebrities get the same treatment.

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords Returns To The House Floor For The First Time Since Being Shot In A Massacre In January Casting A Vote In Favor Of The Debt

A Rare Moment of Unity

“I was doing intensive rehabilitation in Houston at the time but was following the debate closely, and I was pretty disappointed at what was happening in Washington. I’d seen the debate grow so bitter and divisive and so full of partisan rancor. And I was worried our country was hurtling toward a disastrous, self-inflicted economic crisis. That morning, when it became clear the vote was going to be close, my husband, Mark, and I knew we needed to get to Washington quickly. I went straight from my rehabilitation appointment to the airport, and Mark was at our house in Houston packing our bags so he could meet us at the plane.

That night, I remember seeing the Capitol for the first time since I was injured and feeling so grateful to be at work. I will never forget the reception I received on the floor of the House from my colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats. And then, like I had so many times before, I voted.

I worked so hard to get my speech back, and honestly, talking to people who share my determination helped me find my words again. I’ve been to Alaska, Maine, and everywhere in between. Best of all, I got back on my bike. Riding my bike once seemed like such a huge challenge. It seemed impossible.”

Miley Cyrus Twerks At The Mtv Vmassetting Off A Controversy About Cultural Appropriation That Soon Ensnares Seemingly Every White Pop Star On The Planet

• Karlie Kloss wears a Native American headdress and fringed bra at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

• Justin Timberlake is accused of appropriating black music when he tells a black critic “We are the same” after praising Jesse Williams’s BET Humanitarian Award speech about race and police brutality.

• DJ Khaled gets lost on Jet Ski, snaps the whole time.

• Two UW-Madison students snap their meet-cute as the entire student body cheers them on.

• Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers films and mocks an anonymous woman in the gym shower.

• A Massachusetts teen records the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl. The video is later seen by a friend of the victim.

Prior To Going To War In Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Optimistically Predicted The Iraq War Might Last Six Days Six Weeks I Doubt Six Months

What’s more, Vice-President Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people after we overthrow Saddam.

They were both horribly wrong. Instead of six weeks or six months, the Iraq war lasted eight long and bloody years costing thousands of American lives. It led to an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites that took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many Iraqi militia groups were formed to fight against the U.S. forces that occupied Iraq. What’s more, Al Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq before the war, used the turmoil in Iraq to establish a new foothold in that country.

The Iraq war was arguably the most tragic foreign policy blunder in US history.

In 2012 Republicans Predicted That Failure To Approve The Keystone Pipeline Would Send The Price Of Gasoline Sky High And Kill Large Numbers Of Jobs

Despite the fact that the Keystone Pipeline was not approved, the price of gasoline continued to drop below $1.80 per gallon, millions of new jobs were created and unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9% by early 2016. The most optimistic predictions say that the Keystone Pipeline would only create a few dozen long-term jobs and would do nothing to lower the price of gasoline.

Eric Cantors Stunning Primary Loss Suggests No Politician Is Safe From The Rage Of The Tea Party Not Even The Tea Partys Canniest Political Leader

From Party’s Future to Also-Ran in a Single Day

On the day his political career died, Eric Cantor was busy tending to what he still believed was its bright future. While his GOP-primary opponent, David Brat, visited polling places in and around Richmond, Virginia, Cantor spent his morning 90 miles away at a Capitol Hill Starbucks. He was there to host a fund-raiser for three of his congressional colleagues — something he did every month, just another part of the long game he was playing, which, he believed, would eventually culminate in his becoming Speaker of the House.

The preceding five years had brought Cantor tantalizingly closer to that goal. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, he’d rallied waffling House Republicans to stand in lockstep opposition to the new president’s agenda. In 2010, he’d helped elect 87 new Republican members, giving the GOP a House majority and making Cantor the House majority leader. He became the champion of these freshmen members, stoking their radicalism during the debt-ceiling fight and working to undermine Obama and John Boehner’s attempt to strike a “grand bargain.” His alliance with the ascendant tea party was strategic — it gave him leverage not only over Obama but over other Republicans who might also have had aspirations of becoming Speaker. It never occurred to him that the wave he was trying to ride might crash on him instead.

In 1993 When Bill Clinton Raised Taxes On The Wealthiest 15% Republicans Predicted A Recession Increased Unemployment And A Growing Budget Deficit

They weren’t just wrong: The exact opposite of everything they predicted happened. The country experienced the seven best years of economic growth in history.

Twenty-two million new jobs were added.

Unemployment dropped below 4%.

The poverty rate dropped for seven straight years.

The budget deficit was eliminated.

There was a growing budget surplus that economists projected could pay off our national debt in 20 years.

Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist

The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Republicans Predicted That President Obamas Tax Increase For The Top 1% In 2013 Would Kill Jobs Increase The Deficit And Cause Another Recession

You guessed it; just the opposite happened. In the four years following January 1, 2013, when that tax increase went into effect, through January 2017, unemployment dropped from 7.9% to 4.8%, an average of more than 200,000 new jobs were created per month, Wall Street set new record highs, and the budget deficit was cut in half.

Over 5.7 million new jobs were created in the first two years after that tax increase. That’s more jobs created in two years than were created during the combined 12 years of both Bush presidencies.

In 2001 When George W Bush Cut Taxes For The Wealthy Republicans Predicted Record Job Growth Increased Budget Surplus And Nationwide Prosperity

Once again, the exact opposite occurred. After the Bush tax cuts were enacted:

The budget surplus immediately disappeared.

The budget deficit eventually grew to $1.4 trillion by the time Bush left office.

Less than 3 million net jobs were added during Bush’s eight years.

The poverty rate began climbing again.

We experienced two recessions along with the greatest collapse of our financial system since the Great Depression.

In 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady Law mandating nationwide background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.

Apple Announces That It Has Sold 100 Million Iphoneswithin A Few Months It Will Overtake Exxonmobil As The Most Valuable Company In The World

Earthlings Gain a New Appendage

What if we had the singularity and nobody noticed? In 2007, Barack Obama had been on the trail for weeks, using a BlackBerry like all the cool campaigners, when the new thing went on sale and throngs lined up for it. The new thing had a silly name: iPhone. The iPhone was a phone the way the Trojan horse was a horse.

Now it’s the gizmo without which a person feels incomplete. It’s a light in the darkness, a camera, geolocator, hidden mic, complete ­Shakespeare, stopwatch, sleep aid, heart monitor, podcaster, aircraft spotter, traffic tracker, all-around reality augmenter, and increasingly a pal. At the Rio Olympics you could see people, having flown thousands of miles to be in the arena with the athletes, watching the action through their smartphones. As though they needed the mediating lens to make it real.

This device, this gadget — a billion have been made and we scarcely know what to call it. For his 2010 novel of the near future, , Gary Shteyngart made up a word, “äppärät.” “My äppärät buzzing with contacts, data, pictures, projections, maps, incomes, sound, fury.” Future then, present now. His äppäräti were worn around the neck on pendants. Ours are in our pockets when they aren’t in our hands, but they also sprout earbuds, morph into wristwatches and eyeglasses. Contact lenses have been rumored; implants are only a matter of time.

Let’s face it, we’ve grown a new organ.

Republicans Said Waterboarding And Other Forms Of Enhanced Interrogation Are Not Torture And Are Necessary In Fighting Islamic Extremism

In reality, waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation that inflict pain, suffering, or fear of death are outlawed by US law, the US Constitution, and international treaties. Japanese soldiers after World War II were prosecuted by the United States for war crimes because of their use of waterboarding on American POWs.

Professional interrogators have known for decades that torture is the most ineffective and unreliable method of getting accurate information. People being tortured say anything to get the torture to end but will not likely tell the truth.

An FBI interrogator named Ali Soufan was able to get al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah to reveal crucial information without the use of torture. When CIA interrogators started using waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods, Zubaydah stopped cooperating and gave his interrogators false information.

Far from being necessary in the fight against terrorism, torture is completely unreliable and counter-productive in obtaining useful information.

In 2008 Republicans Said That If We Elect A Democratic President We Would Be Hit By Al Qaeda Again Perhaps Worse Than The Attack On 9/11

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney stated that electing a Democrat as president would all but guarantee that there would be another major attack on America by Al Qaeda. Cheney and other Republicans were, thankfully, completely wrong. During Obama’s presidency, we had zero deaths on U.S. soil from Al Qaeda attacks and we succeeded in killing Bin Laden along with dozens of other high ranking Al Qaeda leaders.

Game Of Thrones Arrives On Televisionwith An Assemblage Of Dragons Torture Nudity Incest And Despair A Show The Whole Family Can Enjoy

Explaining Kale

ADAM PLATT: Many things in Foodlandia, these days, have a political element to them, and if you want to emblazon a flag to be carried into battle, you could do worse than a bristly, semi-digestible bunch of locally grown kale.

ALAN SYTSMA: To eat kale is to announce you’re a person who cares about the matters of the day.

AP: The idea of kale is much more powerful than kale itself. In short order it went from being discovered, to appreciated, to being something that was parodied. Frankly, I’m all for the parody.

AS: The same thing happened to pork. Remember bacon peanut brittle? Bacon-fat cocktails? There’s bacon dental floss.

AP: Ahhh, bacon versus kale. The two great, competing forces of our time.

AS: Do you think one gave way to the other?

AP: What we’re really talking about is artisanal bacon, and the more sophisticated-sounding pork belly, made from pigs that were lovingly reared at upstate farms and fed diets of pristine little acorns. Bacon is the great symbol in the comfort-food, farm-fresh-dining movement, a kind of merry, unbridled pulchritude. Kale is the righteous yin to pork’s fatty, non-vegan yang.

AS: But pork has an advantage: People like the way it tastes.

AP: That’s a huge advantage, one that will hopefully see it through to victory.

[bestsmdledvideowall]

Basics concepts Of Video Wall

Basic Concept Of Video Walls

Video walls are a replacement to big size screens at an affordable price. You might be familiar with them, but the reason is you don’t know how they are called? One such thing is an digital advertisement board, scoreboards in stadiums, even the lcd’s arranged in a pattern in a TV showroom, control rooms, projection screen in audio launch events and where not. If you’re a fan of watching WWE the entire screen setup can be termed as video walls(However some are continuous screens and especially made to fit the environment

 Smd Video walls have made their presence felt almost in every field of business. It initially was quite popular with the event management companies who used it as a fine backdrop for creativity and also to display live events of a huge wall.

Slowly the video walls have now penetrated into the hospitality industry, corporate, religious institutes where installing large video walls becomes extremely convenient for viewers to view any events on a big screen. they are also been successfully used for presentations and as welcome screen for any particular events.

To know more about video walls, you could contact Crew Business Systems who can assist you with end to end information on purchasing and installing video walls. Do visit their website crewindia and get any information you need

 have various uses, it depends upon your requirement.

Below are the some real uses of video walls -

·         Used in educational Institutes to teach students

·         Used for digital advertising in various companies.

·         Used in hotels, restaurants to show the food and services.

·         Used in sports grounds to display competition or matches.

·         Used in big and small concerts and events

There are various kinds of video walls available such as - LCD video walls, Direct View LED Video Walls, Blended Projection Systems, Rear Projection Video Walls etc

  Smd screen are booming, 22% CAGR now through 2022 and that’s of course because they can be used in so many different applications. I like to break it down into a few different key uses.One is for attention grabbing. Best SMD LED Video wall in Pakistan, UAE, Saudi Arabia

Think of the number of screens around with digital signage. Want to cut through the clutter, you need to do something different. This can go from a massive 100+ screens to a smaller   to grab attention.

Next is for data visualization, this is a bit like the communication but it’s about pulling mutiple sources, in dashboards, desktops, data of all kinds so everyone in an office or control room or command center can see the same thing and make decisions.

Finally for interactivity and collaboration. This too has some overlap with the category above, but here it’s important multiple people can interact, this could mean a touch video wall or could just mean that users can control the browser or desktop displayed on the video wall.

.

#smd video wall #smd screen #video wall #best smd video wall in pakistan

[bigyack-com]

Killer Robots Aren’t Regulated. Yet.

I love that I can unlock my phone with my face, and that Google can predict what I’m thinking. And that Amazon knows exactly what I need. It’s great that I don’t have to hail a cab or go to the grocery store. Actually, I hope I never have to drive again or navigate or use cash or clean or cook or work or learn. But what if all this technology was trying to kill me? The same technology that is making your life easier is being weaponized. That feature that unlocks your phone with your face, here it is attached to a self-learning machine gun. It’s manufacturer, Kalashnikov, made this video to show the gun using object-recognition software to identify targets. They say it gets more accurate the more you use it. That drone advertised to get awesome snowboarding shots, here’s one that doesn’t require a pilot. This ad shows it with a high-explosive warhead. It hangs out in the sky, until it finds an enemy radar system, then crashes headfirst into it. Oh, and that driverless car you thought was so cool, well, here it is in tank form at a Russian arms fair. It’s called the T-14. Dmitry, here, says he sells them to the Russian government. That contract is part of a trend that’s changing the way wars are waged. Like all good stories, this one starts at a Russian arms fair. We’re a few hours outside of Moscow. Everyone from government officials to gun enthusiasts have come here to see the latest weapons. It’s a family affair. Buyers want to know how the 21st-century technology boom can give their armies a strategic advantage. They want to know: Can technology make war safer? But some fear giving weapons too much power because it brings us closer to machines that could go out and kill on their own. They say, we might not be able to control weapons like these, weapons loaded with artificial intelligence. “So artificial intelligence is a study of how to make machines behave intelligently, which means acting in a way that will achieve the objectives that they’ve been given. And recently, I’ve become concerned about the use of A.I. to kill people.” Stuart Russell. He was an early pioneer in artificial intelligence. He’s also been warning people about its potential danger for years. “So a killer robot is something that locates, selects and attacks human targets.” Stuart isn’t so worried about robots like this. We’re still pretty far from the “Terminator.” But Stuart says we’re not as far from something like this bee-sized drone. He imagined one, and made a movie that he hopes will freak you out. In Stuart’s movie, we see swarms of them armed with explosives set loose on their targets. “The main issue is you’re creating a class of weapons of mass destruction, which can kill millions of people, just like a nuclear weapon. But in fact, it’s much easier to build, much cheaper, much more scalable, in that you can use 1 or 10 or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000. Whereas with a nuclear weapon, it’s sort of all or nothing. It doesn’t destroy the city and the country that you’re attacking. It just kills all the people you want to kill, all males between 12 and 60 or all males wearing a yarmulke in Israel.” The weapon Stuart is describing is terrifying, if it works perfectly. With the current state of tech, many experts say it wouldn’t, but that could be even scarier. “The way we think about A.I. is we build a machine and we put the objective into the machine. And the machine pursues the objective. So you put in the objective of ‘find a cure for cancer as quickly as possible.’ Sounds great, right? O.K. Well, probably the fastest way to do that is to induce tumors in the entire human population, and then try millions of different treatments simultaneously. Then, that’s the quickest way to find a cure. That’s not what you meant, but that’s what you asked for. So we call this the King Midas Problem. King Midas said, ‘I want everything I touch to turn to gold.’ And he got his wish. And the, his food turned to gold, and his drink turned to gold and his family turned to gold. He died in misery and starvation. You know, this is a very old story. We are unable to correctly specify the objective.” Machines will always be limited by the minds of those who made them. We aren’t perfect. And neither is our A.I. Facial recognition software has had trouble with dark skin. Self-driving vehicles still need good weather and calm streets to work safely. We don’t know how long it will take for researchers to create weapons with that kind of flexibility. But behind closed doors, defense labs are working on it and they’re not working alone. “Militaries don’t have to invent A.I. It’s already being built — it’s being driven by major tech companies out in the commercial sector.” Paul Scharre, here, led a Department of Defense working group that helped establish D.O.D. policies on A.I. and weapons systems for the U.S. military. “The reality is all of the technology to put this together, to build weapons that can go out on the road, make their own decisions to kill human beings, exists today.” But it’s one thing to assemble a weapon in a lab, and another to have it work in any environment. And war is messy. “Machines are not really at a point today where they’re capable of flexibly adapting to novel situations. And that’s a major vulnerability in war.” Governments around the world see potential advantages in these weapons. After all, human soldiers — they get tired, emotional. They miss targets. Humans get traumatized. Machines do not. They can react at machine speed. If a missile was coming at you, how quickly would you want to know? Autonomous weapons could save lives. “The same technology that will help self-driving cars avoid pedestrians could be used to target civilians or avoid them, intentionally.” The problem is we’ve gotten this wrong before. “To really understand the growing trends of automation in weapons that have been growing for decades, you have to go all the way back to the American Civil War, to the Gatling Gun. How do I describe a Gatling Gun? Do I have to describe it? Could you guys show a picture of it? Richard Gatling was looking at all of the horrors that were coming back from the Civil War. And he wanted to find a way to make war more humane, to reduce the number of people that are needed on the battlefield. Wouldn’t that be amazing?” Four people operating Gatling’s gun could fire the equivalent of 100 soldiers. Far less people would be needed on the battlefield. It was the precursor to the machine gun. And it was born with the intention to save lives, at least for the army that had the gun. Of course — “The reality was far, far different. Gatling’s invention had the very opposite effect of what he intended. And then it magnified the killing and destruction on the battlefield, by orders of magnitude.” Gatling was wrong. Automating weapons didn’t save lives. And Dmitry, here, is saying something eerily familiar over 150 years later. And it wasn’t just Gatling. Revolutions of warfare have typically not gone well. “Before we ever developed usable biological weapons, the biologists said, stop doing this.” “All civilized countries today have given up chemical weapons as tools of warfare, but we see that they are still used by some rogue nations.” And then, there are nuclear weapons. Even with multiple treaties in place to police their use, the threat of nuclear obliteration remains a global anxiety. “Now, I am become death, a destroyer of worlds.” “Early in the war in Afghanistan, I was part of a Ranger sniper team that was sent out to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to watch infiltration routes for foreign fighters coming across the border. We drove all night, and then began to hike up a steep rocky mountain under cover of darkness. From our position on the ridgeline, we could see for dozens of miles in every direction. And by the time the sun came up, we looked down at this compound beneath us. We were basically in someone’s backyard. We were certain that people would be coming to take a closer look at us. What I didn’t anticipate was that they sent a little girl to scout out our position. She wasn’t particularly sneaky, to be honest. She was reporting back our position, and probably how many of us there were. We watched her and she watched us. And then, she left. And pretty soon after, the Taliban fighters came. The gunfight that ensued brought out the whole village. And we knew that many, many more fighters would be coming before long. So we had to leave that position as we were compromised. Later on in the day, we talked about what would we do in a similar situation to that? You know, one of the things that never came up was the idea of shooting this little girl. But here’s the thing: She was a valid enemy combatant, and killing her would’ve been lawful. So if someone deployed an autonomous weapon, a robot that was designed to perfectly follow the laws of war, it would’ve killed this little girl in that situation. Now, I think that would’ve been wrong, maybe not legally, but morally. But how would a robot know the difference between what’s legal and what’s right?” With so much at stake, you’d think a debate would be happening. Well, there is. It’s just that technology moves at a different pace than diplomacy. “We will continue our discussion on Agenda Item 6A, characterisation of the systems under consideration in order to promote a common understanding on concepts and characteristics relevant to the objectives and purposes of the convention.” “One of the things I learned very quickly was that the official proceedings at the United Nations appear to be completely meaningless.” “Thank you, Mr. Chairperson —” “Support continued deliberations —” “We need a normative framework —” “Difference in interpretation —” “The importance of a multi-disciplinary —” “Down the rabbit hole of endless discussions on a subject of —” “Thank you, Mr. President. We are not in a position to make a declaration right now.” “Good morning.” “How are you?” “I’m good. How are you feeling?” “Oh, I’m fine, except for the governments, you know, their do-nothing attitude.” “We’d like to hear about that.” Jody Williams, here, won a Nobel Peace Prize for her work banning land mines. Now, she’s part of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. “Academics attacked the campaign in the beginning years, you know, saying robotics and A.I. are inevitable. Maybe they are, but applying them to killing human beings on their own is not inevitable, unless you do nothing. And we refuse to do nothing.” Today, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is staging a protest outside of the U.N. The group is made up of activists, nonprofits, and civil society organizations. The campaign’s goal? A ban on all weapons that can target and kill on their own. So far, 30 countries have joined them in supporting a ban, as well as 100 nongovernmental organizations, the European Parliament, 21 Nobel laureates, and leading scientists, like Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky and Elon Musk, as well as Stuart Russell, and more than 4,500 other A.I. researchers. Protester: “Everyone, you can get up now.” “Yay.” Jody’s here with Mary Wareham. “So this is the sixth time that governments have come together since 2014 to talk about what they call lethal autonomous weapons systems.” We’re going to apologize in advance for the obtuse use of acronyms in this portion of the video. “We’re not trying to prohibit the use of artificial intelligence. You know, it can be beneficial to humanity. We’re pro-robots. We’re just anti-killer robots, anti-fully autonomous weapons.” “The C.C.W., the forum of the Convention for Conventional Weapons, — which actually has a name this long, and I can never remember it — operates by consensus. Which means you either negotiate the lowest common denominator, which means doing pretty much nothing, or if the entire room of diplomats wants to move forward with a treaty, for example, and one state says no, then it goes nowhere. And that’s really a dictatorship by one.” “Once a bullet leaves a gun, the rifleman ceases to have control over that bullet. Autonomy is a way of extending human control beyond the time a munition is deployed.” That’s the United States arguing that A.I. will save lives. And remember, without their support, any kind of regulation can’t move forward. “Using algorithm and software to determine and engage target reduces people to objects.” “In the U.S. perspective, there is nothing intrinsically valuable about manually operating a weapon system, as opposed to operating it with an autonomous function.” The United States isn’t alone. The countries working hardest to build autonomous weapons insist we can’t regulate what doesn’t exist yet. And at the same time, their militaries are developing these weapons right now. “The line between a semi-autonomous weapon that has a human in control, and a fully autonomous weapon could simply be a software patch.” “Indeed, some may say it is similar to trying to discuss the internet in the ’80s, ’70s, ’60s at this stage.” “It is not necessary or desirable at this time, to define laws.” “This so-called difficulty of definitions continues to be willful obfuscation.” The truth is, whether they exist or not just depends on how you define them. We don’t have weapons with artificial general intelligence or A.I. that’s as smart as humans. But we do already have weapons that can use A.I. to search, select and engage targets in specific situations. And the technology is only getting better. “So it could easily take another 10 years before they even agree on a definition of what an autonomous weapon is. And by that time, it will be too late. I think for some countries, that’s the point.” In the ongoing race between technology and diplomacy, technology is winning because in this race, the dual-use nature of technology means software being designed to make your life easier clearly has military applications. “The A.I. community, myself included, we were sort of asleep at the wheel for a long time. And we weren’t really thinking about the ways that it could be misused.” Whether we like it or not, we’ve entered the age of the algorithm. And A.I. is changing our place on the battlefield. Is it possible the next generation of soldiers won’t have to kill? “Look, it’s an appealing idea that, someday, robots will just fight other robots and no one will get hurt. I don’t think that’s realistic.” “Unfortunately, if it worked like that, we could just say, ‘Well, why don’t we just play baseball and decide who wins or Tiddlywinks?’ No country is going to surrender until the costs that they’ve incurred are unbearable. So even if your robots are defeated, the next stage is that their robots will start killing your people.” “Because the unfortunate reality is that wars will only end when people die.” Read the full article

[asrarblog]

Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #288. Pharma Veterans shares the wealth of knowledge and wisdom of Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. If you wish to share your stories, ideas and thoughts, please email to [email protected] for publishing your contributions here.

Continued from Previous……

We have seen in adequate detail various aspects of Pharma Industry and its business; we have also seen how DRAP works to control and regulate both segments. We now take this discussion to the possible problem areas where things can go wrong.

Fake/Sub-Standard/Spurious/Counterfeit Drugs are a reflection of the malaise/weakness/rot/disease of the system. It is a problem in many countries like us as they also operate in a similar fashion. For example, it has been projected that 25% medicines in India are Fake, Spurious etc. No genuine statistics are available anywhere, including Pakistan. It does not mean the problem does not exist; it means that we do not know the extent.

I am about to complete 45 years of working and it has all been in Pharma. I cannot give you a %age, but I can say with emphasis and authenticity that fake/spurious/counterfeit drugs are not selling as a parallel business in our country. I do not count Sub-Standard in this category because no one is making wrong drugs deliberately. Yes, due to some human or technical error, a drug may not meet the laid down standards and is declared sub-standard. Sub-Standard drugs may or may not pose a health hazard. Deaths reported in US (Tylenol) and Pakistan (PIC case) were due to contamination with a wrong substance. It was a human error, and a form of being Sub-Standard, but it cost very heavily in terms of human lives.

I present following points to consider in the discussion of where things may go wrong.

Fake/Spurious/Counterfeit Drugs have been regularly reported, discovered and caught. In all cases, these were limited to a certain region or area. It might have gone on for a while before it was caught. The menace stopped there and later emerged elsewhere.

To refresh your memory: fake is when there is no drug inside; Spurious is when the contents do not match the label claim; and Counterfeit is a look-alike, it has same contents and same packaging but not original.

Fake is not interesting from business point of view. It will not give any relief to patients and therefore it will not sell. Fake drugs business is not sustainable and therefore not done usually. Being no drug, a fake drug may not cause damage to patients either.

Spurious may be more interesting. Putting in a cheaper drug in the packing of a costlier drug can bring more profit. For example, a cheaper antibiotic may be packed as an expensive antibiotic. Some patients may get relief, others may not, depending upon the condition. Owing to mixed response, a deliberately produced spurious drug may keep selling.

Counterfeit is even more interesting. Draw an analogy from consumer market. Suppose you want to manufacture and market a shampoo; you will think your own brand and packaging and compete with 100 other brands. It is difficult business. Or you may consider making a counterfeit of Head & Shoulders with similar ingredients; it is a shampoo with almost similar benefits, but it will sell more easily and may bring more money. Same principle applies here. Counterfeits are always made for big brands. These may not be more costly per unit, but they sell a large number of units and make up big revenue.

Manufacturing standards have gone up and medicines cannot be manufactured by hands in the backyard of a house. It is reasonable to assume that only a proper manufacturing unit can be involved in such malpractices.

DRAP system of granting licenses and registration has been improving consistently. The regulatory policing has not risen proportionately, and the effort to push older units’ upgradation is weak and listless.

The Federal and Provincial Regulatory structures are disconnected. They work independently, do not share information and may even be at odds with each other.

Manufacturing is regulated mainly by federal government, while retail business is overseen by provinces. The turfs are defined and are not trespassed by either party. This system was probably designed in the days of One-Unit when entire West Pakistan (now Pakistan) was One Unit. The Wahdat Colony of Lahore and One Unit Colony of Bahawalpur are a memorial of that. Things changed long ago and changed further after 18th Amendment, but relevant changes in the structure have not been done.

DCO MoH (before DRAP) was usual laid-back government department like others. DRAP concept and proposal was floated (probably by Dr. Sarfaraz Khan Niazi, a Pakistani working in the US). It kept lying and collecting dust for quite some time. No one wanted to leave the comfort zone. Finally, DRAP was formed.

Like all such authorities (TDAP etc,), DRAP is a mix of old employees in the Basic Pay Scale structure, and new contract employees on new, higher pay scales. The heartburn and hostility started from the first day. The first CEO was selected after a long effort but could not accomplish much due to in-house conflicts and continuous bickering. The second CEO was appointed with some delay but is out of office due to court case. The gentleman currently working as CEO is on additional charge. A permanent CEO cannot be posted till the court case is resolved. The Directors are also working ad-hoc; their tenure is extended every three months. In this situation DRAP cannot work as effectively as it would otherwise.

While the new hires at DRAP are working with new energy, the old guard is still holding on to the previous practices. Sizeable difference between the pace of working tiers causes friction and slows down the overall pace.

Previous CM of Punjab came up with some new ideas which remained half-cooked. For example, DTRE lab was established in Sundar Industrial Estate, but it is still not doing much.

The Summary is that the overall Regulatory Structure is not robust enough to perform its mandated jobs diligently and effectively.

Continued……

The Case of ‘Ja’alee’ (spurious) Drugs – Where it may Go Wrong (I)- Blog Post #288 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #288. Pharma Veterans shares the wealth of knowledge and wisdom of Veterans for the benefit of Community at large.

[biofunmy]

A.I. Is Making It Easier to Kill (You). Here’s How.

I love that I can unlock my phone with my face, and that Google can predict what I’m thinking. And that Amazon knows exactly what I need. It’s great that I don’t have to hail a cab or go to the grocery store. Actually, I hope I never have to drive again or navigate or use cash or clean or cook or work or learn. But what if all this technology was trying to kill me? The same technology that is making your life easier is being weaponized. That feature that unlocks your phone with your face, here it is attached to a self-learning machine gun. It’s manufacturer, Kalashnikov, made this video to show the gun using object-recognition software to identify targets. They say it gets more accurate the more you use it. That drone advertised to get awesome snowboarding shots, here’s one that doesn’t require a pilot. This ad shows it with a high-explosive warhead. It hangs out in the sky, until it finds an enemy radar system, then crashes headfirst into it. Oh, and that driverless car you thought was so cool, well, here it is in tank form at a Russian arms fair. It’s called the T-14. Dmitry, here, says he sells them to the Russian government. That contract is part of a trend that’s changing the way wars are waged. Like all good stories, this one starts at a Russian arms fair. We’re a few hours outside of Moscow. Everyone from government officials to gun enthusiasts have come here to see the latest weapons. It’s a family affair. Buyers want to know how the 21st-century technology boom can give their armies a strategic advantage. They want to know: Can technology make war safer? But some fear giving weapons too much power because it brings us closer to machines that could go out and kill on their own. They say, we might not be able to control weapons like these, weapons loaded with artificial intelligence. “So artificial intelligence is a study of how to make machines behave intelligently, which means acting in a way that will achieve the objectives that they’ve been given. And recently, I’ve become concerned about the use of A.I. to kill people.” Stuart Russell. He was an early pioneer in artificial intelligence. He’s also been warning people about its potential danger for years. “So a killer robot is something that locates, selects and attacks human targets.” Stuart isn’t so worried about robots like this. We’re still pretty far from the “Terminator.” But Stuart says we’re not as far from something like this bee-sized drone. He imagined one, and made a movie that he hopes will freak you out. In Stuart’s movie, we see swarms of them armed with explosives set loose on their targets. “The main issue is you’re creating a class of weapons of mass destruction, which can kill millions of people, just like a nuclear weapon. But in fact, it’s much easier to build, much cheaper, much more scalable, in that you can use 1 or 10 or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000. Whereas with a nuclear weapon, it’s sort of all or nothing. It doesn’t destroy the city and the country that you’re attacking. It just kills all the people you want to kill, all males between 12 and 60 or all males wearing a yarmulke in Israel.” The weapon Stuart is describing is terrifying, if it works perfectly. With the current state of tech, many experts say it wouldn’t, but that could be even scarier. “The way we think about A.I. is we build a machine and we put the objective into the machine. And the machine pursues the objective. So you put in the objective of ‘find a cure for cancer as quickly as possible.’ Sounds great, right? O.K. Well, probably the fastest way to do that is to induce tumors in the entire human population, and then try millions of different treatments simultaneously. Then, that’s the quickest way to find a cure. That’s not what you meant, but that’s what you asked for. So we call this the King Midas Problem. King Midas said, ‘I want everything I touch to turn to gold.’ And he got his wish. And the, his food turned to gold, and his drink turned to gold and his family turned to gold. He died in misery and starvation. You know, this is a very old story. We are unable to correctly specify the objective.” Machines will always be limited by the minds of those who made them. We aren’t perfect. And neither is our A.I. Facial recognition software has had trouble with dark skin. Self-driving vehicles still need good weather and calm streets to work safely. We don’t know how long it will take for researchers to create weapons with that kind of flexibility. But behind closed doors, defense labs are working on it and they’re not working alone. “Militaries don’t have to invent A.I. It’s already being built — it’s being driven by major tech companies out in the commercial sector.” Paul Scharre, here, led a Department of Defense working group that helped establish D.O.D. policies on A.I. and weapons systems for the U.S. military. “The reality is all of the technology to put this together, to build weapons that can go out on the road, make their own decisions to kill human beings, exists today.” But it’s one thing to assemble a weapon in a lab, and another to have it work in any environment. And war is messy. “Machines are not really at a point today where they’re capable of flexibly adapting to novel situations. And that’s a major vulnerability in war.” Governments around the world see potential advantages in these weapons. After all, human soldiers — they get tired, emotional. They miss targets. Humans get traumatized. Machines do not. They can react at machine speed. If a missile was coming at you, how quickly would you want to know? Autonomous weapons could save lives. “The same technology that will help self-driving cars avoid pedestrians could be used to target civilians or avoid them, intentionally.” The problem is we’ve gotten this wrong before. “To really understand the growing trends of automation in weapons that have been growing for decades, you have to go all the way back to the American Civil War, to the Gatling Gun. How do I describe a Gatling Gun? Do I have to describe it? Could you guys show a picture of it? Richard Gatling was looking at all of the horrors that were coming back from the Civil War. And he wanted to find a way to make war more humane, to reduce the number of people that are needed on the battlefield. Wouldn’t that be amazing?” Four people operating Gatling’s gun could fire the equivalent of 100 soldiers. Far less people would be needed on the battlefield. It was the precursor to the machine gun. And it was born with the intention to save lives, at least for the army that had the gun. Of course — “The reality was far, far different. Gatling’s invention had the very opposite effect of what he intended. And then it magnified the killing and destruction on the battlefield, by orders of magnitude.” Gatling was wrong. Automating weapons didn’t save lives. And Dmitry, here, is saying something eerily familiar over 150 years later. And it wasn’t just Gatling. Revolutions of warfare have typically not gone well. “Before we ever developed usable biological weapons, the biologists said, stop doing this.” “All civilized countries today have given up chemical weapons as tools of warfare, but we see that they are still used by some rogue nations.” And then, there are nuclear weapons. Even with multiple treaties in place to police their use, the threat of nuclear obliteration remains a global anxiety. “Now, I am become death, a destroyer of worlds.” “Early in the war in Afghanistan, I was part of a Ranger sniper team that was sent out to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to watch infiltration routes for foreign fighters coming across the border. We drove all night, and then began to hike up a steep rocky mountain under cover of darkness. From our position on the ridgeline, we could see for dozens of miles in every direction. And by the time the sun came up, we looked down at this compound beneath us. We were basically in someone’s backyard. We were certain that people would be coming to take a closer look at us. What I didn’t anticipate was that they sent a little girl to scout out our position. She wasn’t particularly sneaky, to be honest. She was reporting back our position, and probably how many of us there were. We watched her and she watched us. And then, she left. And pretty soon after, the Taliban fighters came. The gunfight that ensued brought out the whole village. And we knew that many, many more fighters would be coming before long. So we had to leave that position as we were compromised. Later on in the day, we talked about what would we do in a similar situation to that? You know, one of the things that never came up was the idea of shooting this little girl. But here’s the thing: She was a valid enemy combatant, and killing her would’ve been lawful. So if someone deployed an autonomous weapon, a robot that was designed to perfectly follow the laws of war, it would’ve killed this little girl in that situation. Now, I think that would’ve been wrong, maybe not legally, but morally. But how would a robot know the difference between what’s legal and what’s right?” With so much at stake, you’d think a debate would be happening. Well, there is. It’s just that technology moves at a different pace than diplomacy. “We will continue our discussion on Agenda Item 6A, characterisation of the systems under consideration in order to promote a common understanding on concepts and characteristics relevant to the objectives and purposes of the convention.” “One of the things I learned very quickly was that the official proceedings at the United Nations appear to be completely meaningless.” “Thank you, Mr. Chairperson —” “Support continued deliberations —” “We need a normative framework —” “Difference in interpretation —” “The importance of a multi-disciplinary —” “Down the rabbit hole of endless discussions on a subject of —” “Thank you, Mr. President. We are not in a position to make a declaration right now.” “Good morning.” “How are you?” “I’m good. How are you feeling?” “Oh, I’m fine, except for the governments, you know, their do-nothing attitude.” “We’d like to hear about that.” Jody Williams, here, won a Nobel Peace Prize for her work banning land mines. Now, she’s part of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. “Academics attacked the campaign in the beginning years, you know, saying robotics and A.I. are inevitable. Maybe they are, but applying them to killing human beings on their own is not inevitable, unless you do nothing. And we refuse to do nothing.” Today, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is staging a protest outside of the U.N. The group is made up of activists, nonprofits, and civil society organizations. The campaign’s goal? A ban on all weapons that can target and kill on their own. So far, 30 countries have joined them in supporting a ban, as well as 100 nongovernmental organizations, the European Parliament, 21 Nobel laureates, and leading scientists, like Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky and Elon Musk, as well as Stuart Russell, and more than 4,500 other A.I. researchers. Protester: “Everyone, you can get up now.” “Yay.” [cheering] Jody’s here with Mary Wareham. “So this is the sixth time that governments have come together since 2014 to talk about what they call lethal autonomous weapons systems.” We’re going to apologize in advance for the obtuse use of acronyms in this portion of the video. “We’re not trying to prohibit the use of artificial intelligence. You know, it can be beneficial to humanity. We’re pro-robots. We’re just anti-killer robots, anti-fully autonomous weapons.” “The C.C.W., the forum of the Convention for Conventional Weapons, — which actually has a name this long, and I can never remember it — operates by consensus. Which means you either negotiate the lowest common denominator, which means doing pretty much nothing, or if the entire room of diplomats wants to move forward with a treaty, for example, and one state says no, then it goes nowhere. And that’s really a dictatorship by one.” “Once a bullet leaves a gun, the rifleman ceases to have control over that bullet. Autonomy is a way of extending human control beyond the time a munition is deployed.” That’s the United States arguing that A.I. will save lives. And remember, without their support, any kind of regulation can’t move forward. “Using algorithm and software to determine and engage target reduces people to objects.” “In the U.S. perspective, there is nothing intrinsically valuable about manually operating a weapon system, as opposed to operating it with an autonomous function.” The United States isn’t alone. The countries working hardest to build autonomous weapons insist we can’t regulate what doesn’t exist yet. And at the same time, their militaries are developing these weapons right now. “The line between a semi-autonomous weapon that has a human in control, and a fully autonomous weapon could simply be a software patch.” “Indeed, some may say it is similar to trying to discuss the internet in the ’80s, ’70s, ’60s at this stage.” “It is not necessary or desirable at this time, to define laws.” “This so-called difficulty of definitions continues to be willful obfuscation.” The truth is, whether they exist or not just depends on how you define them. We don’t have weapons with artificial general intelligence or A.I. that’s as smart as humans. But we do already have weapons that can use A.I. to search, select and engage targets in specific situations. And the technology is only getting better. “So it could easily take another 10 years before they even agree on a definition of what an autonomous weapon is. And by that time, it will be too late. I think for some countries, that’s the point.” In the ongoing race between technology and diplomacy, technology is winning because in this race, the dual-use nature of technology means software being designed to make your life easier clearly has military applications. “The A.I. community, myself included, we were sort of asleep at the wheel for a long time. And we weren’t really thinking about the ways that it could be misused.” Whether we like it or not, we’ve entered the age of the algorithm. And A.I. is changing our place on the battlefield. Is it possible the next generation of soldiers won’t have to kill? “Look, it’s an appealing idea that, someday, robots will just fight other robots and no one will get hurt. I don’t think that’s realistic.” “Unfortunately, if it worked like that, we could just say, ‘Well, why don’t we just play baseball and decide who wins or Tiddlywinks?’ No country is going to surrender until the costs that they’ve incurred are unbearable. So even if your robots are defeated, the next stage is that their robots will start killing your people.” “Because the unfortunate reality is that wars will only end when people die.”

Sahred From Source link Technology

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2PjKTCv via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

[topfygad]

How to get a visa for Iran – Ultimate guide 2019

  Important – For some reason, the Iranian Government has decided to block my website, so if you want to browse Against the Compass while you are in Iran, you must use a VPN. For more information, read how to choose the right VPN for Iran and access blocked sites

Getting an Iran tourist visa might sound a bit complicated and overwhelming to some travelers, as there are many variables and a couple of exceptions to take into account.

However, the Government is also trying to make the Iran visa policy easier and facilitate the process for many nationalities.

This is the ultimate guide to getting a visa for Iran, where you will find all the latest updated information.

This post contains the latest information from 2019.

For more practical information, read my 80 useful tips for traveling to Iran

    Here you will find:

Who is eligible for a free visa for Iran Iran visa on arrival (VOA) When you should apply for an Iran visa in advance How to apply for an Iran travel visa in advance e-Visa for Iran Visa for Iran duration Iran visa extension Visa for American, UK and Canadian citizens

  Who can apply for a free Iran tourist visa?

Most likely, you can’t enter Iran on a free visa because only 8 countries are eligible for that. These lucky countries are:

Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Georgia, Malaysia, Syria, Turkey, Venezuela

If you don’t hold a passport from any of the above countries, you must pay for your visa.

Exception! If you enter via Kish Island, all nationalities who are eligible for a VOA, can get a 14-day free Iran tourist visa if they remain in Kish. You may think: who the hell wants to travel to Iran to just remain in Kish? Well, the truth is that many European expats living in Dubai or Doha fly out to Kish to spend the weekend there.

A lot of people who visit Iran also go to Caucasian countries. Read my ultimate guide for traveling to Georgia

  Iran visa on arrival (VOA)

Except for citizens of:

Canada, UK, US, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Canada, Colombia, India, Iraq, Jordan, Nepal, Pakistan, Somalia and Sri Lanka

Everybody can get an Iran visa on arrival at several international airports in Iran. 

Important! Of course, citizens of Israel can’t enter Iran.

According to MFA, if there is any evidence on your passport, your visa will be granted as long your last visit to Israel was more than six months ago.

However, I would not rely 100% on it so, if you have any evidence, I would recommend renewing your passport. For more information, read: Avoid Israeli passport stamps – FAQ

NEW UPDATE Summer 2018! – If entering Iran via any of the international airports, you can now ask the authorities to stamp your visa on a separate piece of paper. This is particularly useful for people traveling to the USA!

  Which airports are eligible for an Iran tourist visa on arrival?

Tehran, Shiraz, Esfahan, Qeshm & Kish Island, Mashhad, and Tabriz

  Iran travel visa requirements – VOA

Hotel reservation – You need to bring your hotel reservation printed out for your first night in Iran at least. If you are staying with a friend, make sure to have their contact details.

Your host contact – Have in hand your host contact details, whether it is a hotel or a friend. If they can’t contact them, you may have to wait at the airport for a very long time. 

Cash, preferably in € – You must pay your visa in cash.

Travel Insurance – All travelers must have valid travel insurance for Iran. If you do have it, you should bring any documents which prove it. If you don’t, they will make you buy it at the airport and these were the prices in March 2018: 1 to 31 days: 14€ 32 to 45 days: 23€ 46 to 62 days: 28€ 63 to 92 days: 34€

However, the insurance you buy at the airport has very limited coverage, so coming with proper insurance is a must. Unfortunately, most popular travel insurance companies, such as World Nomads, will not cover you for Iran. Therefore, I strongly recommend IATI Insurance, a very professional company which fully covers you for Iran and offers many plans for any kind of traveler and budget.

Moreover, the readers of Against the Compass will get a 5% discount. (you will see the discount after calculating the quote)

BUY IT THROUGH THIS LINK TO GET YOUR 5% DISCOUNT

If you want to know more option, read how to find the right travel insurance for Iran

  Iranian visa fee

It really depends on your nationality but, typically, prices would range from 40 to 150€. I have a Spanish passport and paid 75€.

In Iran, many websites are blocked, so you will need a VPN to access them. Read how to find the right VPN for Iran

  When you need to apply for an Iran tourist visa in advance

If you can get a visa on arrival, why should you get it in advance?

There are some exceptions:

1 – You enter Iran overland 

If are coming from Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Pakistan or Turkey, you must apply for your visa in advance.

Apparently, a VOA is available at the Armenian border but there are some reports of people who tried to cross there recently, who failed to get a visa, so don’t rely 100% on it.

2 – You don’t want to wait at the airport for several hours

If you already have your visa, you can enter the country immediately. However, the VOA process takes around 2 or 3 hours and, in some cases, me for example, it may take up to 6 hours.

Reasons for waiting hours vary but, in my case, it was because I didn’t have a return flight ticket, said that I planned to travel to Iraqi Kurdistan afterward and had a brand-new passport. They found me a bit suspicious.

3 – To secure your visa 

There are some reports from travelers who claimed that their VOA was not granted because they didn’t have a return flight ticket or because the authorities could not contact their host or any other excuse.

The percentage of people in this situation is very low but still, there might be some small risk. If you want to make sure, get your visa in advance.

4 – You are an American, British or Canadian citizen

Like I said before, these three nationalities are not eligible for a VOA, so you will have to arrange your visa via a tour company.

  How to apply for an Iran tourist visa in advance

In order to get your Iran visit visa in advance, you will have to first get a code which, basically, is a letter of invitation from a tour operator.

Once you have this code, you will be able to collect your visa at any embassy or at any airport. 

How to get your Iran visa code?

As you may imagine, there are quite a few companies that can provide with this code.

I strongly recommend the guys from 1stQuest. Why?

Basically, because they offer the lowest rate, their system is easy, fast and they are very responsive. 

A few things you should know regarding the Iran visa code:

The code is valid for one month – This means that you need to collect your visa within a month.

Iran visa code cost – It costs 29€. 

Timing – Since very recently, it only takes 1 to 3 working days.

You are planning to enter Iran overland – You will have to pick up your visa at the embassy and you will have to mention which embassy at the application, as 1stQuest will send the code to them.

You are flying in Iran – You need to tell which airport, so you will just have to collect, very quickly, your visa once you arrive at the airport.

Moreover, the readers of this blog can use my discount code to get an exclusive 5% discount which can be used for all the services of 1stQuest, not only for your visa but for the travel insurance, booking hotels, bus & plane tickets, and tours.

This is my discount code which you can use as many times as you want: ATC-QST

CLICK HERE TO APPLY FOR YOUR VISA CODE WITH 1stQuest

Remember that you can use my discount code for any service of 1stQuest, including booking hotels, travel insurance, flight tickets and tours. However, 1stQuest may also be blocked in Iran, so try to book all your stuff in advance or, alternatively, get a VPN to access blocked sites. For more information, read how to find the right VPN in Iran.

  Picking up your Iranian visa at the embassy

Once you get the code, you can pick up your visa.

Since I was in Tajikistan, after traveling the Pamir Highway and the Wakhan Valley, I decided to pick it up in Dushanbe. 

However, regardless the embassy, your first step will be to verify that your code has arrived at the embassy. For this, the agency will give you a tracking number which you need to show at the embassy. However, you could actually call them and there’s no need to go to the embassy.

I still went to the embassy but only because it was really close to my hostel. Either way, you will have to wait for one day until they check that the code has arrived.

  Iran travel visa requirements – Needed documents to apply for your Iran visa at the embassy

Passport with a minimum of 6-months’ validity

Passport copy

2 passport photos

Visa application form – To be collected and filled at the embassy

When you have all your documents, you can go to the embassy. For EU nationalities, the price is 75€. An Australian friend paid 150€. You will have to make the deposit at the Iranian bank and come back with your payslip. The bank is very close to the embassy and they guy will give you the address.

Once you show the payslip, you will have to leave your passport and come back on the next day (or the same afternoon) to collect your visa.

Tehran – Iran visa on arrival

  e-Visa for Iran

The e-visa for Iran still doesn’t work

In 2017, the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) launched a website where you can actually apply for your visa saving you from getting a letter of invitation.

However, the website is not working properly and, apparently, pretty much nobody succeeded. 

October 2018 Update – Recent reports say many travelers haven’t been able to get their visa. At first, the system seems to work fine but then, the visa verification remains as pending for weeks by then just getting rejected.

  Visa for Iran – Duration

Normally, everybody traveling to Iran should be able to get a 30-day visa, regardless you enter via airport or overland.

  Iran Visa Extensions

Extending your visa is very easy and feasible. Typically, if you get a 1-month visa, you can extend it twice for 30 days. This means that you can travel in Iran for up to 90 days.

You can extend your visa at any Immigration Visa Office in any provincial capital. Yazd or Esfahan are very popular places to extend your visa among travelers.

I personally extended mine in Bandar Abbas, a southern city. Each office has its own rules but, in Bandar Abbas, they required a passport and visa copy and two passport photos. The one-month extension cost me 345,000IR and it took 24 hours to proceed.

  Visa for Americans, UK and Canadian citizens

As you may know, the MFA requires Americans, British and Canadian nationals to make a tour from arrival to departure; essentially this means you need a guide at all times you on a daily basis. 

Citizens of these countries need to have a confirmed itinerary, which should be requested from a valid tour company. For this, they should send a passport copy, as well as passport photos to the tour operator.

Typically, getting the invitation letter takes around 30 working days. 

It is highly recommended that these nationalities book their international flight ticket after receiving the LOI, as there have been several refusals.

As per the tour operator, I recommend Key2Persia, one of the tour operator in Iran, which is even recommended by the Lonely Planet. I know them personally, hired some of their services and even worked together on promoting Pars Province. For further information, email them at [email protected].

  Keep reading more content about Iran:

80 Useful tips for traveling to Iran Iran 1-month itinerary How to get a visa for Iran

    from Cheapr Travels https://ift.tt/2M4BITr via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Cheapr Travels

[asylum-ireland-blog]

Significant work needed to increase level of diversity on nation's local authorities

New Post has been published on http://asylumireland.ml/significant-work-needed-to-increase-level-of-diversity-on-nations-local-authorities/

Significant work needed to increase level of diversity on nation's local authorities

We have the best policy in the world in terms of access to local elections and in running for local elections, but there are several problems and the primary one is that people don’t know that they can vote and or run, writes Elaine Loughlin.

With just three out of the 948 local councillors around the country coming from an migrant background, there is significant work to be done to increase diversity on local authorities.

While the census shows the number of residents born outside of Ireland is steadily on the increase — with the number standing at 810,406 or 17.3% of the entire population in 2016 — these new Irish are not being represented at political level. While any resident, including asylum seekers, have the right to vote, in many cases it is a lack of knowledge that holds people back.

“We actually have the best policy in the world in terms of access to local elections and in running for local elections, but there are several problems and the primary one I suppose is that people don’t know that they can vote and certainly people don’t know that they can run,” said Joe O’Brien, who is integration outreach officer with the Immigrant Council of Ireland.

Ireland offers a vote to every adult ordinarily resident here, with no stipulation around how long you have to be living here before that eligibility applies.

Anyone who is ordinarily resident in Ireland can also stand for local election.

“I do workshops with groups of migrants on a very regular basis, basically anywhere I can get 10 people in a room I will go and do a workshop and 80% to 90% of people in the room won’t know that they can vote, so that’s the base line problem,” said Mr O’Brien.

“Of those who know they can run they are not taking the leap.”

The Immigrant Council of Ireland now hopes it can put forward at least one non-Irish candidate in each constituency in next year’s local elections.

  “We need people to start running, to diversify the ballot paper, to put some colour on the posters up on the poles.”

  “We are not going to bridge the gap in one election cycle. It is going to take a few, we need to test the waters and we are saying to people try it out, we will give you guidance, don’t be disappointed if you don’t win, run a campaign that you can get something out of.”

The council is now running workshops, has developed an internship scheme which has already placed five migrants with councillors, and is hosting one-to-one mentoring for people who are serious about running.

“We are very much pushing people to run,” said Mr O’Brien.

However, the party system in Ireland can be very difficult to break through, with the majority of candidates and elected represented being male.

Mr O’Brien pointed out that in Donegal Council Council just three of the 37 elected representatives are women.

“A lot of parties are closed and at a local level, the same as you have with women it can be difficult to get into, it can be a closed shop particularly the larger parties where there is competition for places and completion for nominations.

“The competition for the nomination at party level in some respects can be more aggressive or more energetic than the public election itself,” he said.

However, David Stanton, the minister of state for equality, immigration and integration, said all parties are encouraging people from every background to get involved.

“I think there are a lot of people who want to become involved and have joined parties.

“Every party, without exception, is encouraging migrants to become members and get involved.”

While taking the party route can be more difficult, even for prospective Irish candidates, the Immigrant Council is keen to point out that there are other options available to anyone interested.

“You can run as independent very very easily in Ireland, four weeks before the election you fill out the nomination paper, you get 15 signatures from people who are in that area and you are off,” Mr O’Brien said.

“So we are trying to demystify it for people, we want to say it is very easy to run as candidate.”

Part of their work is about making people realise the value in using the campaign as a platform and it may not necessarily to get elected the first time around.

“We are saying to people that there is really good community value and personal value in running a campaign.

  “You might only get 100 or 200 votes, but we need to start making that small impact first before we get people elected.”

  He used the example of one Polish candidate who ran as an Independent in the last local elections who did not get elected but managed to secure 400 votes, as a result she was then approached by one of the main political parties to run on their ticket.

“The value of getting migrants to run is that other migrants will then find that they can vote, so it’s also a strategy of getting more migrants involved more broadly speaking, but we need the figureheads running in as many areas as we can to boost the knowledge of voting rights.

“We need people to be groundbreakers, we need people to be role models in the community, we need people to make a stand on a particular issue, we are saying you can use the local election campaign as a way of raising issues be they local or national,” he said.

As a young boy, Ammar Ali often attended neighbourhood meetings with his father where issues like a lack of street lighting or potholes were discussed.

When his family moved here from Pakistan in 2011, he got involved in his school’s student council as he studied for the Leaving Cert.

And so joining a political party was a natural progression for the 24-year-old who is now studying pharmaceutical science.

“In 2013, I saw that there was a change in leadership and that Micheál Martin has a new vision to take Ireland forward, I also saw in the local elections of 2014 that new faces were being represented by Fianna Fáil so that give me a particular spark.

“I felt that the party was trying to build the communication gap between local councillors and the local community.

“So that was the reason I was attracted to join Fianna Fail,” said Mr Ali, who was elected equality officer in the IT Tallaght student union elections. He also served as the chair of the IT’s Órga Fianna Fáil branch between 2015 and 2017.

Unlike Pakistan where it can take years to go up the ladder and to have your voice heard in politics, Mr Ali said he has been pleasantly surprised by how all members are listened to in Irish political parties.

  “In Irish politics, I found that if you are willing to do hard work, if you are sincere with the community you will get a chance to represent that community within the party and outside the party.”

  Mr Ali, who lives on Dublin’s South Circular Road, has his sights set on the 2019 local elections, but would some day love to be involved in national politics.

“It’s up to the party as to who they want to run as a candidate, but I will definitely put my name forward for Dublin South-West Inner-City,” he said of next year’s local elections.

“There are a huge amount of migrants in the area and also I know lot of local community members.

“I know the issues and I think it would be really good to have a local migrant voice representing people there.

“If I get a chance to represent my party and my community on the council it would be an honour.

“Coming from Pakistan and becoming a councillor, that’s something that Pakistanis would be proud of.”

He added that he has been inspired by Senator Catherine Ardagh who he has worked within the constituency.

“Right now is my main focus is getting Catherine Ardagh elected, she inspired me greatly. She lost the local election, she came strong in the 2014 local election, then I saw her losing by 35 votes in the Dáil election but she is going strong,” he said.

“I think Fianna Fáil has a really good agenda of bringing everyone together,” he said.

Having been involved in politics at a grassroots level in her native Ukraine, Yulia Ghumman decided to intern with a local councillor here.

She spent four months shadowing Fingal councillor Duncan Smith and is now thinking about running in next year’s local elections but believes the real barrier for migrants is a lack of knowledge.

“I didn’t even know that I could vote in the local elections before this project, this information is not available to us, we generally don’t know about our right to vote or how to get involved in politics,” Ms Ghumman said.

She came to Ireland in February 2015 with her husband who got here to work as a doctor and quickly became involved in volunteering with the Association of Ukrainians of Ireland.

Ms Ghumman, who lives in Swords said: “I was actually involved in politics before in my own country.

“I was a member of a party, it was just during my school time after I graduated from school, I was interested in politics so I helped out with the party with activities.”

During her studies she became interested in the issue of integration and immigration.

“So it was a combination of interest from at home and interest in politics picked up through my involvement in the association, that made me think about doing the internship.”

She said the placement, which was organised with the help of the Immigrant Council of Ireland, has given her a new confidence around getting involved in Irish politics.

“I started in Fingal County Council offices in Swords.

“I got see first hand what a councillor’s day is like, I was involved in daily administrative tasks, and learned how he deals with people, with cases in the phone, how he solves problems, meetings, Labour Party meetings, dropping leaflets.

“I also helped design a leaflet for him, we went canvassing for the Repeal the Eighth referendum, and I helped prepare maps for the canvassing teams,” she said.

Ms Ghumman also got the change to spend one day a week in the office of Labour TD Brendan Ryan in Leinster House.

  “I was really lucky because I felt I was learning from the best, with Duncan I had access to Leinster House so I really learned a lot about politics.”

  “Before starting the internship I had no idea that any councillor would be interested in taking on an intern.”

She said the lack of awareness among migrant communities of their right to vote and even run for election is a huge issue which means they are not represented.

“It is a problem because even in Leinster House there are very few females, most elected politicians are men, I know there are three migrant councillors but I have never met any elected immigrants.

“That is like a barrier for us.

“If we had more exposure to politics maybe more people might have an interest in getting involved.”

She added: “I am still thinking about running, it is very interesting and I am also considering joining the Labour Party.”

It was love that made Tian Yu Lloyd stay in Ireland, but connections to her native China that led to involvement in politics here.

She came to Dublin in 2002 to study where she met her husband who is Irish and made her life here.

“I wasn’t in touch with the Chineses community in Ireland or the migrant community for a long time because everyone around me was Irish,” she said.

However, after finding a group on Facebook and making contact she found that many people who have come to work and live here from other countries had similar issues to her.

“I started taking an interest in migrant issues, particularly because of social media and from getting in touch with different groups on Facebook.”

In 2016, during the general election campaign, she began reading the leaflets and party manifestos that came through her letterbox and was drawn to the Social Democrats.

“I got to know some of the other members of the party and realised that it was a group of people that have very similar ideas to mine.

“There is also no historical baggage attached to the Social Democrats, I found they just wanted to do good,” said the native of Hangzhou in China.

Since joining the party she has become involved in canvassing and awareness raising.

She is now chair of the Dublin Bay North chapter of the Social Democrats and has been encouraged by the response on the doors when she goes out canvassing.

“The fact that I am a migrant sometimes helps and people who have also come to Ireland will often talk to me and raise issues.”

The stay-at-home mother, who has an eight-year-old daughter and a stepson, 17, also volunteers part-time with Place of Sanctuary.

The organisation aims to promote the integration, inclusion and welfare of refugees, asylum seekers and vulnerable migrants, by encouraging every sector of society to make a practical commitment to becoming places of welcome and safety.

  “Part of the work we do here in Ireland is called Sanctuary in Politics, we put on courses for migrants who may be interested in politics and who want to find out more about the political system in Ireland.”

  She was a student on the first of these courses and stayed on to help others with a similar interest.

“It’s a course to teach people how to communicate and how to effectively raise your voice, it also goes through how the Irish political system works, how the voting system works, and how to get in touch with the media and also some public speaking skills.”

The group has also gone on day trips to Leinster House to get a feel for national politics.

Her reason for getting involved in politics and community work is simple: “It’s about ordinary people trying to make a change.”

It is now “high time” for migrants to become involved in politics, whether that is joining a party, running for office, or simply exercising their vote, according to Ini Usanga.

She is helping to organise an event in Cork’s City Hall next month to encourage people who have come to Ireland to participate in politics.

Ms Usanga came to Ireland in 2001 from Nigeria and through her work as a youth worker and family violence expert she became aware of a significant gap in the political sphere.

“The whole thing started when I was working with a lady and she had a problem, she had an issue so we felt it was best to refer her on to her local reps in Cork to get further support.

  “But she came back and she was bawling crying with how she was treated.”

  “So that’s what sparked this, I felt that if we had a migrant involved in politics we could probably relate better with that person.”

Ms Usanga who now lives in Rathcool, Co Cork added: “I think it is now time for us to take a stand.

“It’s high time that migrants also have a voice in Irish politics, especially here in Cork because we have no one.”

The mother of three is involved with the Love and Care for People group which is working with a number of organisations to create awareness and will be encouraging involvement through the upcoming mobilisation event.

“A few months ago we started talking about organising an event to get ourselves involved in Irish politics, to have a voice as opposed to other people making policies for us.”

Political parties will take part in the event which has been organised for September 22 in City Hall and will be similar to an event held in Dublin last March. Ms Usanga who is now considering running in the 2019 local elections, stressed that while information is key the onus is also on migrants to get involved themselves.

“You don’t necessarily have to run for office, but you have a vote and you can use it, it’s about participation.

“It’s about using your voice, when you feel that something is not right, go to your local TD or your local councillor and speak out, it’s really about that and about encouraging people to get involved.

“No one should feel like they are exempt because at the end of the day we live in Ireland, Ireland is now our home to all us and our families, so we should be engaged, we should participate.”

She added that sometimes those who come to Ireland to work or study fear they will be dubbed as “the black sheep” if like they speak out about issues in the community, but this is not the case.

“People prefer to keep quiet. It’s important that they know that when something affects then or they don’t feel comfortable with something, you speak about it you don’t stay silent, because silence doesn’t change anything.”

  , https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/specialreports/significant-work-needed-to-increase-level-of-diversity-on-nations-local-authorities-867862.html

#asylum ireland

[lexxikitty-blog1]

How I Spent the Apocalypse by Selina Rosen

Read: July 2015

Rating: 4.25 Stars

My second book by Rosen, and just like the first one I read, I was initially reluctant to give the book a try.  I had this one on my possibilities list for a longish while, and had tried the sample a few times.  

Beginning kept putting me off.  Mostly because the book is set up with, what I assume are transcripts from pod-casts which have tips on how to survive an apocalyptic situation.  Then story stuff.  So there I was trying to see if I wanted to try a book and kept running into this survival tip thingie.  And that kept tripping me up.  I kept not wanting to read that, not wanting to skip to story without having tried podcast, etc.  Eventually I just got the book and read it.  I admit that I did so directly because of the other book I have read from this author.  Completely different genre and subject matter, but I also had a tough time trying to convince myself to try the book but ended up loving it, so . . . I just plucked up my courage and read this one.

It was an interesting enough book, I suppose.  A woman has made a nice living through subscribers to podcats in which she gives tips on how to survive stuff. Like the apocalypse.  She isn't doing those podcasts for the money, though, but because she deeply believes that the world is about to end.  And has believed this to be the case since she was a small child (her parents love of disaster movies, she notes, might have played a part).  The money, though, has helped make her own arrangements for survival that much more . . . (insert word here I can't think of).  Basically she would have lived in a certain area, with supplies, and in strongly defensivesable (against the weather and like) dwelling.  The money just helps her add a few things.

Right.  So, if all goes right with the world, and to a certain extent she would have much preferred this outcome, she would have been the crazy paranoid woman doing these podcasts until she fell over dead from old age.  Without an Apocalypse occurring, I mean.  Well, that isn't what happened.  

What happened was, and here's one of my problems of the book, horrible humans existed.  Well, I tried to figure a way to make that sentence work, didn't.  Point is that the author has the same rant over and over again in the book about how everyone are so damn much materalistic, and if we just hadn't been involved in the middle east for oil, and stuff, the world would have been a much better place.  Also, religion kills.  And is stupid.  It's not that the ranting doesn't have a certain amount of sense to it, it's that it comes up non-stop constantly. Throughout the book.  I mean, I get it.  The world went 'pfft, humans disease, must get rid of them' *the planet thinks then wiggles really really hard*.  And it did so because humans dumb.  Just stop telling me over and over again, okay?

Right, well, I meant to say "what happened was that Pakistan and India traded some nuclear missiles, causing the dominoes to fall over and the world went all apocalyptic and stuff, with earthquakes and volcanoes being set off by the nuclear exchange and massive waves of dust crowded the skies, and caused issues".  Right after those missiles flew through the air, Katy (the 'crazy' one) had proclaimed, through her podcasts, that the world was about to end now. So, take your survival kits and hole up.  Probably too late, now, to flee.  

While readying her area for the coming storms, as in pulling her windmill down into the ground and shielding it, and covering her solar panels, a reporter and camera man turn up. The same two who always come out to interview the crazy woman.  Katy is somewhat willing to talk to them because 1) their constant observation and cracks about her being crazy actually boosted her own subscriber base; 2) the reporter woman is hot; 3) this one is more one that unfolded as events occurred - talking to them for a few minutes allowed her to tell CNN's viewers to hunker down and expect the worst.

Then the worst occurs.  Katy's all safe and snug in her hidey-hole.  Annoyed, though, because her idiot sons didn't follow her advice and hightail it to her place before the storms started.  So, all safe and secure, when she hears a knocking on her door. It was not a raven saying Lenore, but a woman, the reporter from before.  Somewhat changed in appearance, it must be noted, since the wind and storm has blown, and or torn most of her clothing to shreds.  She's whimpering.  And wishing help.  Mostly, entrance.  While babbling about how she had run from where her car, and camera man, just got picked up by the wind, to be lost somewhere up there.

So, Katy breaks one of her own rules and allows this reporter to enter.  I've a strong suspicion that this reporters name is Lucy, but I'm do not have 100% recall these many days after having read the book.  And everywhere Katy goes, walking through her place, she turns and there's Lucy, stuck to her like a frightened woman needing reassurance that other humans still exist.

So.  The apocalypse occurs. Lucy and Katy are in Katy's place.  Massive waves of snow blanket the area.  Long long winter.  Other people turn up to inhabit the small bunker Katy built.  Tensions built.  The longish winter continues.

An interesting book.  I felt slightly disconnected from the story, though, for unknown reasons.  There were some funny moments. Some moments of 'please stop ranting already, or, if you must rant, change to a different rant, please', some moments of love, and affection in the post-apocalyptic world.

#2015 Reads #Kindle Unlimited #Lesbian Fiction #Lesbian Book Review #Book Review #Yard Dog Press #Apocalyptic #Lesbian Romance #Romance #4.25 Stars

[patriotsnet]

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-republicans-riot-after-obama-was-elected/

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

Undocumented Kids Are Saved By Obamas Executive Order Daca Which Would Put A Halt To Deportation For Those Whod Entered The Country Before Age 16 And Yet In A Bid To Get The Gop To Come Over To His Side On Immigration Reform The President Has Also Deported A Record 15 Million People In His First Term

A Family Caught in Immigration Limbo

When Belsy Garcia saw her mother’s number appear on her iPhone on the afternoon of June 15, she felt what she calls the “uncomfortable fluttering” sensation in her chest. She knew that daytime calls signaled an emergency. The worst one had come the previous year, when her sister told her ICE agents had placed their father in federal custody.

Garcia was attending Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, when her father was marched out of her childhood home. As an undocumented immigrant — like both of her parents, who are from Guatemala — she couldn’t qualify for loans. She financed her ­education through scholarships and a stipend she earned as a residential assistant. Now she wondered if her mother was calling to say her father had been deported, which might force her to leave school to become the family’s breadwinner.

But this call was different. “Go turn on the television,” Garcia’s mother said. “You’re going to be able to work, get a driver’s license.”

Onscreen, President Obama was announcing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the United States as children could apply for Social Security numbers and work permits. Garcia qualified: Her parents had brought her to this country when she was 7 years old. DACA transformed her into a premed student who could actually become a doctor. “It was like this weight was lifted,” she says. “All of that hard work was going to pay off.”

In The Next Hundred Days Our Bipartisan Outreach Will Be So Successful That Even John Boehner Will Consider Becoming A Democrat After All We Have A Lot In Common He Is A Person Of Color Although Not A Color That Appears In The Natural World Whats Up John Barack Obama White House Correspondents Dinner

And Then There Were Three

The first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court did so in 1880. It would take another 101 years for a woman to sit on that bench rather than stand before it. Even then, progress was fitful. Over the 12 years that Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg served together, their identities evidently merged; lawyers regularly addressed Ginsburg as “Justice O’Connor.” When O’Connor retired in 2006, she left the faux Justice O’Connor feeling lonely. Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned of something far more alarming: What the public saw on entering the court were “eight men of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side.” They might well represent the most eminent legal minds in America. But there was something antiquated, practically mutton-choppy, about that portrait.

How many female justices would be sufficient? Nine, says Justice Ginsburg, noting that no one ever raised an eyebrow at the idea of nine men.

Seal Team Six Kills Osama Bin Ladenraiding His Secret Compound In Abbottabad Pakistan While Obama And His Top Advisers Watch A Live Feed Of The Mission From The White House Situation Room The Picture Of The Assembled Becomes The Last Supper Of The Obama Era

Poop Feminism

For me, it’s one moment. All the bridesmaids have come to the fancy bridal shop to see Maya Rudolph try on wedding dresses. This should be a familiar scene: The bride emerges from the changing room and … This is the dress! The friends clap. The mother cries. Everyone is a princess. Go ahead and twirl!

But when the bride emerges in Bridesmaids, almost all of her friends have started to feel sick. Sweat coats their skin. Red splotches creep over their faces. They try to “ooh” and “aah,” but it’s already too late. It starts with a gag from Melissa McCarthy, followed by another gag. Then a gag that comes simultaneously with a tiny wet fart. It’s the smallness of the fart that’s important here. It’s the kind of fart that slips out — a fart that could be excused away, a brief, incongruous accident. Women don’t fart in wedding movies, and women certainly don’t fart at the exact moment that the bride comes out in her dress. This can’t be happening. ­Melissa McCarthy blames the fart on the tightness of her dress. We breathe a sigh of relief.

Then sweet Ellie Kemper gags, and the sound effect is surprisingly nasty. Ellie’s face is gray. Melissa’s face is red. They look bad. They are embarrassed. How far is this going to go?

The camera cuts. We are above now. We look down from a safe perch as the release we have been anticipating and dreading begins. It is horribly, earth-­shatteringly gross. A woman has just pooped in a sink. The revolution has begun.

The Government Acquires A 61 Percent Stake In Gm And Loans The Company $50 Billion The Auto Bailout Will Eventually Be Heralded As A Great Success Adding More Than 250000 Manufacturing Jobs To The Economy

The Auto Industry Gets Rerouted

“The president was very clear with us that he only wanted to do stuff that would fundamentally change the way they did business. And that’s what we did. There were enormous changes. For example, General Motors had something like 300 different job classifications that the union had. If you were assigned to put the windshield wipers on, you couldn’t put tires on. And we wiped all that stuff out. We basically gave back management the freedom to manage, to hire, to fire. People stopped getting paid even when they were on layoff. We reduced the number of car plants so that there wasn’t so much overcapacity. So now, when you have 16 million cars sold , they’re making a fortune.”

Black Lives Matter Activists Are Arrested In Baton Rouge Louisianaprotesting The Murder Of Alton Sterling; More Than 100 People Are Detained In St Paul Minnesota Protesting The Murder Of Philando Castile

What Is the Point of a Quantified Self?

Melissa Dahl: The Fitbit was introduced at a tech conference eight years ago. It’s kind of incredible to realize that, before then, this idea of the “quantified self” didn’t really exist in the mainstream.

Jesse Singal: I feel like it’s the intersection of all these different trends: Everyone plays video games these days. You got smartphones everywhere. And people are realizing that solutions to the big problems that lead to sleeplessness and anxiety and bad eating — unemployment and income inequality and yada yada yada — aren’t gonna get solved anytime soon.

MD: That’s interesting, because all of this self-tracking is also, according to some physicians, giving people more anxiety! A Fitbit-induced stress vortex.

Cari Romm: It feels like productive stress, though. I’m talking as a recovered Fitbit obsessive, but it does make you look at Fitbit-less people like, “You mean you don’t care how many steps you took today?”

MD: Oh, God. I don’t care. Should I care? Sleep is the one thing I obsessed over for a while. Which does not really help one get to sleep.

JS: Do you think an actually good and not obsession-­inducing sleep app could help, though?

MD: There’s some aspect to the tracking idea that really does work. I mean, it’s just a higher-tech version of a food journal or sleep journal, right? Ben Franklin 300 years ago was tracking his 13 “personal virtues” in his diary.

JS: Would Ben Franklin have been an insufferable tech-bro?

Officer Darren Wilson Fatally Shoots Michael Brownin The St Louis Suburb Of Ferguson Sparking A National Protest Movement And Setting Off Unrest That Will Remain Unresolved Two Years Later

On the Triumph of Black Culture in the Age of Police Shootings

In the two years since Mike Brown was fatally shot by the police in Ferguson, and the video footage of his dead body in the street went viral, we have seen the emergence of a perverse dichotomy on our screens and in our public discourse: irrefutable evidence of grotesquely persistent racism, and irrefutable evidence of increasing black cultural and political power. This paradox is not entirely new, of course — America was built on a narrative of white supremacy, and black Americans have simultaneously continued to make vast and essential contributions to the country’s prominence—but it has become especially pronounced. And it’s not just because of the internet and social media, or the leftward shift of the culture, or black America’s being sick and tired of being sick and tired. In fact, it is all of these things, not least two terms with a black president. In the same way that black skin signals danger to the police , his black skin, to black people, signaled black cultural preservation. African-Americans didn’t see a black man as the most powerful leader in the free world; we saw the most powerful leader in the free world as black. This is what comedian Larry Wilmore was expressing at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he said, “Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga.” It was a moment of unadulterated black pride.

Militants Attack American Compounds In Benghazi Libya Killing Us Ambassador Chris Stevens And Three Other Americans There Will Eventually Be Eight Congressional Probes Into The Incident

“I Know I Let Everybody Down”

“Before the debate, David Plouffe and I went in to talk to him and give him a pep talk and he said, ‘Let’s just get this over with and get out of here,’ which is not what you want to hear from your candidate right before the debate. We knew within ten minutes that it was going to be a ­debacle. We had armed him with a joke — it was his 20th anniversary, and he addressed Michelle — and it turns out Romney was expecting just such a line and had a really great comeback. And Romney was excellent — just free and easy and clearly well prepared and showed personality that people hadn’t seen before. Obama looked like he was at a press conference.

We had a meeting at the White House and he said, ‘I know I let everybody down and that’s on me, and I’m not going to let that happen again,’ and that was his attitude. We always had debate camps before, where we’d re-create in hotel ballrooms what the set would look like, and all of the conditions of the real debate. When we went down to Williamsburg, Virginia, for the next debate camp, he seemed really eager to engage in the prep. We had a decent first night. That was on Saturday. On Sunday night, Kerry, playing Romney, got a little more aggressive and Obama a little less so; it looked very much like what we had seen in Denver. It was like he’d taken a step back.

Scott Brown Is Elected Massachusetts Senatorturning Ted Kennedys Seat Republican For The First Time Since 1952 And Suddenly Throwing The Prospect Of Passing Obamacare Into Jeopardy

Plan B

“I’m talking to Rahm and Jim Messina and saying, ‘Okay, explain to me how this happened.’ It was at that point that I learned that our candidate, Martha Coakley, had asked rhetorically, ‘What should I do, stand in front of Fenway and shake hands with voters?’ And we figured that wasn’t a good bellwether of how things might go.

This might have been a day or two before the election, but the point is: There is no doubt that we did not stay on top of that the way we needed to. This underscored a failing in my first year, which was the sort of perverse faith in good policy leading to good politics. I’ll cut myself some slack — we had a lot to do, and every day we were thinking, Are the banks going to collapse? Is the auto industry going to collapse? Will layoffs accelerate? We just didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics that first year, and the loss in Massachusetts reminded me of what any good president or elected official needs to understand: You’ve got to pay attention to public opinion, and you have to be able to communicate your ideas. But it happened, and the question then was, ‘What’s next?’

Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In Hits Bookstores Making The Feminist Case That Women Should Be More Aggressive And Ambitious In Their Careers And Making Feminists Themselves Very Angry

The “Mommy Wars” Finally Flame Out

After decades of chilly backlash, we find ourselves, these past eight years, in an age of feminist resurgence, with feminist websites and publications and filmmakers and T-shirts and pop singers and male celebrities and best-selling authors and women’s soccer teams. Of course, as in every feminist golden age, there has also been dissent: furious clashes over the direction and quality of the discourse, especially as the movement has become increasingly trendy, shiny, and celebrity-backed.

Perhaps the most public feminist conflagration of the Obama years came at the nexus of policy and celebrity, of politics and pop power. It was the furor over Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who gave a viral 2010 TED Talk about women in the workplace who “leave before they leave” — who alter their professional strategy to accommodate a future they assume will be compromised by parenthood — which led to the publication of her 2013 feminist business manifesto, Lean In.

It’s a lesson of the Obama era: One approach to redressing inequality does not have to blot out the others. Sometimes, attacking from all angles is the most effective strategy.

Texas State Senator Wendy Davis Laces Up Her Pink Running Shoes And Spends Ten Long Hours Attempting To Filibuster A Billthat Wouldve Imposed Statewide Abortion Restrictions

“The Concept of Dignity Really Matters”

“I was given an enormous degree of latitude. I did communicate with the White House counsel on occasion about high-profile cases, but it was much more in the nature of just giving them a heads-up, to calm any nervous feelings they might have. There’s only one exception to that, and it was on marriage equality, in the Hollingsworth v. Perry case in 2013. We were contemplating coming in and arguing that it was unconstitutional for California to refuse to recognize the legal validity of same-sex marriages. But we didn’t have to do it . And because it was a discretionary judgment, and it was such a consequential step, that was the one matter where I really sought out the president’s personal guidance. I wanted to make sure the president had a chance to thoroughly consider what we should do before we did it. It was really one of the high points of my tenure. It was a wide-ranging conversation about doctrinal analysis, about where society was now, about social change and whether it should go through the courts or through the majoritarian process, about the pace of social change, about the significance of the right at stake. He was incredibly impressive.

A Golf Summit Between John Boehner And Barack Obama Stirs Hopethat Perhaps The Two Parties Will Come To A Budget Agreement And Forestall A True Crisis Secret And Semi

A Grand Bargain That Wasn’t, Remembered Three Ways

“The president of the United States and the Speaker of the House, the two most powerful elected officials in Washington, decided in a conversation that they both had to try to make something happen. Maybe it would be the way it worked in a West Wing episode in a world that doesn’t work like a West Wing episode. That’s how it started — two individuals saying we’re going to try. I think they both shared a belief in the art of the possible, and they both did not think compromise was a dirty word.

When our cover was blown — a Wall Street Journal editorial came out saying that Boehner and Obama were working on this and attacking the whole premise — that was devastating. It resulted in Cantor being a part of the talks. Cantor and Boehner came in, and I think it was a weekend private session with the president in the Oval Office, and they were talking about the numbers. At one point Cantor said, ‘Listen, it’s not just the numbers. There’s concern that this will help you politically. Paul Ryan said if we do this deal, it will guarantee your reelection. If we agree with Barack Obama on spending and taxes, that takes away one of our big weapons.’ There were so many obstacles, some of them substantive — how much revenue, and what about the entitlements? — but there was also this overlay of ‘This is going to help Obama.’

Illustrations by Lauren Tamaki

The Obama Administration Unveils Its Plan For Regulating Wall Streetwhich Is Then Introduced In Congress By Senator Chris Dodd And Representative Barney Frank

MJ=JC?

Lane Brown: Michael Jackson’s death was a big deal for lots of obvious reasons, including the surprising way it happened and the fact that he was arguably the most famous person on the planet.

Nate Jones: He was an A-lister with an indisputable body of work; he was 50 years old, his hits were the right age — old enough that every generation knew them, but not too old that they weren’t relevant anymore.

LB: But it was also the first huge celebrity death to happen in the age of social media, or at least the age of Twitter.

NJ: MJ’s death came alongside the protests in Iran, which was when Twitter went mainstream.

LB: It also meant that so much of the instant reaction was to make it all about us.

Frank Guan: In a lot of ways, the culture prefers the death of artists to their continuing to live. Once an artist gets launched into the stratosphere, there’s no way to come down, and that permanence becomes monotonous. They run out of timely or groundbreaking material and the audience starts tuning out. At some point, their fame eclipses their art, and then the only way to get the general audience to appreciate them anew is for them to die.

LB: People seem to like the grieving process so much that even lesser celebrities get the same treatment.

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords Returns To The House Floor For The First Time Since Being Shot In A Massacre In January Casting A Vote In Favor Of The Debt

A Rare Moment of Unity

“I was doing intensive rehabilitation in Houston at the time but was following the debate closely, and I was pretty disappointed at what was happening in Washington. I’d seen the debate grow so bitter and divisive and so full of partisan rancor. And I was worried our country was hurtling toward a disastrous, self-inflicted economic crisis. That morning, when it became clear the vote was going to be close, my husband, Mark, and I knew we needed to get to Washington quickly. I went straight from my rehabilitation appointment to the airport, and Mark was at our house in Houston packing our bags so he could meet us at the plane.

That night, I remember seeing the Capitol for the first time since I was injured and feeling so grateful to be at work. I will never forget the reception I received on the floor of the House from my colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats. And then, like I had so many times before, I voted.

I worked so hard to get my speech back, and honestly, talking to people who share my determination helped me find my words again. I’ve been to Alaska, Maine, and everywhere in between. Best of all, I got back on my bike. Riding my bike once seemed like such a huge challenge. It seemed impossible.”

Miley Cyrus Twerks At The Mtv Vmassetting Off A Controversy About Cultural Appropriation That Soon Ensnares Seemingly Every White Pop Star On The Planet

• Karlie Kloss wears a Native American headdress and fringed bra at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

• Justin Timberlake is accused of appropriating black music when he tells a black critic “We are the same” after praising Jesse Williams’s BET Humanitarian Award speech about race and police brutality.

• DJ Khaled gets lost on Jet Ski, snaps the whole time.

• Two UW-Madison students snap their meet-cute as the entire student body cheers them on.

• Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers films and mocks an anonymous woman in the gym shower.

• A Massachusetts teen records the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl. The video is later seen by a friend of the victim.

Prior To Going To War In Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Optimistically Predicted The Iraq War Might Last Six Days Six Weeks I Doubt Six Months

What’s more, Vice-President Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people after we overthrow Saddam.

They were both horribly wrong. Instead of six weeks or six months, the Iraq war lasted eight long and bloody years costing thousands of American lives. It led to an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites that took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many Iraqi militia groups were formed to fight against the U.S. forces that occupied Iraq. What’s more, Al Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq before the war, used the turmoil in Iraq to establish a new foothold in that country.

The Iraq war was arguably the most tragic foreign policy blunder in US history.

In 2012 Republicans Predicted That Failure To Approve The Keystone Pipeline Would Send The Price Of Gasoline Sky High And Kill Large Numbers Of Jobs

Despite the fact that the Keystone Pipeline was not approved, the price of gasoline continued to drop below $1.80 per gallon, millions of new jobs were created and unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9% by early 2016. The most optimistic predictions say that the Keystone Pipeline would only create a few dozen long-term jobs and would do nothing to lower the price of gasoline.

Eric Cantors Stunning Primary Loss Suggests No Politician Is Safe From The Rage Of The Tea Party Not Even The Tea Partys Canniest Political Leader

From Party’s Future to Also-Ran in a Single Day

On the day his political career died, Eric Cantor was busy tending to what he still believed was its bright future. While his GOP-primary opponent, David Brat, visited polling places in and around Richmond, Virginia, Cantor spent his morning 90 miles away at a Capitol Hill Starbucks. He was there to host a fund-raiser for three of his congressional colleagues — something he did every month, just another part of the long game he was playing, which, he believed, would eventually culminate in his becoming Speaker of the House.

The preceding five years had brought Cantor tantalizingly closer to that goal. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, he’d rallied waffling House Republicans to stand in lockstep opposition to the new president’s agenda. In 2010, he’d helped elect 87 new Republican members, giving the GOP a House majority and making Cantor the House majority leader. He became the champion of these freshmen members, stoking their radicalism during the debt-ceiling fight and working to undermine Obama and John Boehner’s attempt to strike a “grand bargain.” His alliance with the ascendant tea party was strategic — it gave him leverage not only over Obama but over other Republicans who might also have had aspirations of becoming Speaker. It never occurred to him that the wave he was trying to ride might crash on him instead.

In 1993 When Bill Clinton Raised Taxes On The Wealthiest 15% Republicans Predicted A Recession Increased Unemployment And A Growing Budget Deficit

They weren’t just wrong: The exact opposite of everything they predicted happened. The country experienced the seven best years of economic growth in history.

Twenty-two million new jobs were added.

Unemployment dropped below 4%.

The poverty rate dropped for seven straight years.

The budget deficit was eliminated.

There was a growing budget surplus that economists projected could pay off our national debt in 20 years.

Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist

The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Republicans Predicted That President Obamas Tax Increase For The Top 1% In 2013 Would Kill Jobs Increase The Deficit And Cause Another Recession

You guessed it; just the opposite happened. In the four years following January 1, 2013, when that tax increase went into effect, through January 2017, unemployment dropped from 7.9% to 4.8%, an average of more than 200,000 new jobs were created per month, Wall Street set new record highs, and the budget deficit was cut in half.

Over 5.7 million new jobs were created in the first two years after that tax increase. That’s more jobs created in two years than were created during the combined 12 years of both Bush presidencies.

In 2001 When George W Bush Cut Taxes For The Wealthy Republicans Predicted Record Job Growth Increased Budget Surplus And Nationwide Prosperity

Once again, the exact opposite occurred. After the Bush tax cuts were enacted:

The budget surplus immediately disappeared.

The budget deficit eventually grew to $1.4 trillion by the time Bush left office.

Less than 3 million net jobs were added during Bush’s eight years.

The poverty rate began climbing again.

We experienced two recessions along with the greatest collapse of our financial system since the Great Depression.

In 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady Law mandating nationwide background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.

Apple Announces That It Has Sold 100 Million Iphoneswithin A Few Months It Will Overtake Exxonmobil As The Most Valuable Company In The World

Earthlings Gain a New Appendage

What if we had the singularity and nobody noticed? In 2007, Barack Obama had been on the trail for weeks, using a BlackBerry like all the cool campaigners, when the new thing went on sale and throngs lined up for it. The new thing had a silly name: iPhone. The iPhone was a phone the way the Trojan horse was a horse.

Now it’s the gizmo without which a person feels incomplete. It’s a light in the darkness, a camera, geolocator, hidden mic, complete ­Shakespeare, stopwatch, sleep aid, heart monitor, podcaster, aircraft spotter, traffic tracker, all-around reality augmenter, and increasingly a pal. At the Rio Olympics you could see people, having flown thousands of miles to be in the arena with the athletes, watching the action through their smartphones. As though they needed the mediating lens to make it real.

This device, this gadget — a billion have been made and we scarcely know what to call it. For his 2010 novel of the near future, , Gary Shteyngart made up a word, “äppärät.” “My äppärät buzzing with contacts, data, pictures, projections, maps, incomes, sound, fury.” Future then, present now. His äppäräti were worn around the neck on pendants. Ours are in our pockets when they aren’t in our hands, but they also sprout earbuds, morph into wristwatches and eyeglasses. Contact lenses have been rumored; implants are only a matter of time.

Let’s face it, we’ve grown a new organ.

Republicans Said Waterboarding And Other Forms Of Enhanced Interrogation Are Not Torture And Are Necessary In Fighting Islamic Extremism

In reality, waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation that inflict pain, suffering, or fear of death are outlawed by US law, the US Constitution, and international treaties. Japanese soldiers after World War II were prosecuted by the United States for war crimes because of their use of waterboarding on American POWs.

Professional interrogators have known for decades that torture is the most ineffective and unreliable method of getting accurate information. People being tortured say anything to get the torture to end but will not likely tell the truth.

An FBI interrogator named Ali Soufan was able to get al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah to reveal crucial information without the use of torture. When CIA interrogators started using waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods, Zubaydah stopped cooperating and gave his interrogators false information.

Far from being necessary in the fight against terrorism, torture is completely unreliable and counter-productive in obtaining useful information.

In 2008 Republicans Said That If We Elect A Democratic President We Would Be Hit By Al Qaeda Again Perhaps Worse Than The Attack On 9/11

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney stated that electing a Democrat as president would all but guarantee that there would be another major attack on America by Al Qaeda. Cheney and other Republicans were, thankfully, completely wrong. During Obama’s presidency, we had zero deaths on U.S. soil from Al Qaeda attacks and we succeeded in killing Bin Laden along with dozens of other high ranking Al Qaeda leaders.

Game Of Thrones Arrives On Televisionwith An Assemblage Of Dragons Torture Nudity Incest And Despair A Show The Whole Family Can Enjoy

Explaining Kale

ADAM PLATT: Many things in Foodlandia, these days, have a political element to them, and if you want to emblazon a flag to be carried into battle, you could do worse than a bristly, semi-digestible bunch of locally grown kale.

ALAN SYTSMA: To eat kale is to announce you’re a person who cares about the matters of the day.

AP: The idea of kale is much more powerful than kale itself. In short order it went from being discovered, to appreciated, to being something that was parodied. Frankly, I’m all for the parody.

AS: The same thing happened to pork. Remember bacon peanut brittle? Bacon-fat cocktails? There’s bacon dental floss.

AP: Ahhh, bacon versus kale. The two great, competing forces of our time.

AS: Do you think one gave way to the other?

AP: What we’re really talking about is artisanal bacon, and the more sophisticated-sounding pork belly, made from pigs that were lovingly reared at upstate farms and fed diets of pristine little acorns. Bacon is the great symbol in the comfort-food, farm-fresh-dining movement, a kind of merry, unbridled pulchritude. Kale is the righteous yin to pork’s fatty, non-vegan yang.

AS: But pork has an advantage: People like the way it tastes.

AP: That’s a huge advantage, one that will hopefully see it through to victory.

[abrarkureshy]

#SaveWater or Pakistan will run out of water by 2025. As scary, as it sounds and equally complicated. I do not know where to begin; to put it in simple words Pakistan is facing acute shortage of water, we all know that still we pay no heed to it. For every drop we waste today, our generations will bear the consequences tomorrow. If we do not use water wisely today, will not be able to do anything about it tomorrow but regret, simple.

Background:

It is very easy to play the victim card and blame the Government for everything that’s going wrong. Being a citizen, we are equally responsible. Statistically, Pakistan ranked third in water shortage; only 30% population has access to clean drinking water.

If, God forbid this situation persists we will be left with no water by year 2025. This is actually as scary as it sounds.

What makes this situation even worse is our insensitivity towards the matter. Neither we build up new water reservoirs nor we utilize available water efficiently, rather waste it. Apart from worldly affairs, our religion teaches to utilize water efficiently and prohibit wastage of water.

Don’t waste water even if you’re by a running stream – Prophet Mohammad (S.A.W.W.)

What does water scarcity mean?

Water scarcity means unavailability of sufficient water for consumption. Globally, 2.8 billion people suffer from water scarcity and 1.2 billion do not have access to clean drinking water. Water scarcity is the epicenter of a thousand problems that are associated with it. Our life depends on water; no water no life, simple equation. This paper on water storage and trees states

“Water is an essential resource the availability of which underpins poverty reduction, social and economic development and environmental sustainability, and is thus key to realizing livelihood opportunities”.

Following are few consequences of water scarcity to give a basic idea:

Unavailability of fresh drinking water

No / limited water available to nourish ourselves, our families, our society & future generations

Contaminated water for usage which is a constant health hazard

Apart from humans, contaminated water is also hazardous to marine life & agriculture

Unavailability of water for irrigation

Unable to irrigate, hence no crops no agriculture

Lack of water causing agriculture lands to go barren

On one hand our economy majorly depends on agriculture and on other, no agriculture means scarcity of food as well

Unavailability of water for household & industrial consumption

Most of our household chores involve water usage, absence of water means

Apart from household, water is main component across industries, water shortage means shutting down of industries as well

Root Cause:

Two root causes of this whole problem are:

We do not have any mechanism of saving available water

We use available water irresponsibly, hence wastage

Studies revealed the little water we have today contaminated with harmful metals like Copper, Nickel and Cobalt etc.  Which are the root causes of spread of Hepatitis in the people of Pakistan, especially in those living in big cities. We do not have any mechanism of saving water or even industrial / household waste. Therefore, we dump waste in rivers resulting in contamination of water and excessive pumping of underground water causing scarcity at alarming a rate.

Here are pictorial representations of how we waste water in performing daily chores:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Need to realize and educate that we do not have unlimited water available. If we do not use it efficiently soon we will left with nothing. We have already done the same to natural gas. We used to have ample reserves, we utilized irresponsibly & without proper planning and now it has come down to gas load management during winters.

How to Counter It

Now that we know the problem, question arises how to counter it? I personally think, if not a whirlpool we can at least create ripples in our individual capacities at our respective levels, ripples make all the difference. Following are few initiatives we can take to counter this situation.

Create Awareness

Question arise how to create awareness about water shortage and why? Water shortage is an emergency. We need to spread the word as we did during dengue epidemic etc. so people know and recognize it as a serious problem. Spreading the word is first step. Once people realize and start discussing it the next step is how to deal with it? As individual, best we can do is stop wasting water personally and teach & preach. Educate peers, relatives, community members. Encourage others to efficiently use water and stop wastage. Moving forward, arrange public awareness sessions, run informative documentaries, create animation series for children, TV programs, talk shows. Pressure groups to make efforts for governments to start building dams and water reservoirs do necessary legislation to stop water wastage and dumping of trash in rivers and streams.

Recognizing the problem is always the first step towards resolution as it shows the intent to counter the problem.

Build Reservoirs

Although reservoir building is government job. As individuals we can contribute to this rather pave the way. Unfortunately, Pakistan is politically active country in a bad way so we politicize everything good or bad. For example Kalabagh Dam. We can campaign in favor of it, create awareness how & why it is necessary for our survival, mobilize public, create pressure groups, and bring those against it on table to discuss. True picture and critical nature of dams demonstrated in such a way that commoners understand and relate to it, can serve as lay stones for a public movement. Just that it has to be apolitical.

Not only Kalabagh Dam we require many small & medium dams as well to cater different areas and needs. Alongside dams, small reservoirs to conserve rainwater for drinking and irrigation purpose are equally critical & important.

Governments role aside, we can build small reservoirs at community level to store water for local consumption & conservation. Building dams takes years and require lot of capital, we will have to pay taxes and mobilize private sector as well to fund these projects. Government alone cannot succeed; community must endorse.

Stop Wasting Water (Use water wisely)

Seems easy but most critical part because it requires collective intent & action. We waste so much water routinely. Especially we blessed ones who do not have to fetch water buckets from far away every morning. We open shower and spend 30 mins wondering about life and water gets wasted all this time same for brushing teeth even making ablution, Washing clothes, in kitchen and everywhere else.

Start from ourselves. Stop wasting water, simple. Keep in mind for every drop we waste not only us our future generations as well bear the consequences. Once you start utilizing water efficiently educated others subtly and encourage them to do the same. Tell them why it is necessary specially kids and house cleaners.

Only if we stop wasting water things will start improving automatically. With shrinking usage, our existing reservoirs will not run out of quantities so rapidly and we will have enough time to build up more reservoirs. Teach your kids to use water efficiently while doing daily chores like brushing teeth taking showers etc. Educate them water is scarce and we might run out of it if we use it irresponsibly.

Plant more trees

Since childhood, we learn about importance of trees and their contribution to society. Trees literally do magic. From providing oxygen to climate control to keeping land from erosion to safeguarding water channels underneath the land. Trees help bringing rain through transpiration process (Google that). Most recently, we have encountered heatwave in many cities of Pakistan lack of greenery / forests / trees is one of the root cause. Cutting thousands of trees in the name of development to pave way for roads, malls and concrete structures causing damage to the ecosystem and disturbing the natural habitats that do multiple services one being water storage.  Trees ensure, support and nurture biodiversity, prevent soil erosion and maintenance of land fertility.

Off topic but humans, require about 9.5 tons of air for breathing in a year, 23% oxygen in the air makes about 740 kg of oxygen per year. One tree on average produces 100 kg oxygen per year so roughly every person require seven or eight trees to breath properly and on the contrary Pakistan has averagely 5 trees per person (1131 trees / sq. km)  and the distribution is greatly uneven.

Pledge for the Cause

Last but not the least, pledge for the cause. An individual cannot do all things pick any one out of the above mentioned and make sincere efforts. If all units of society start working on different aspects, the circle will eventually complete and final goal will be easily achieved, which in our case is saving water for ourselves, our generations for a prosperous today and tomorrow.

Make a chart or dairy or journal to record and monitor water usage to track progress, share with others, encourage them, make support groups, spread the word, repeat. Idea is to use water wisely.

#SaveWater or Pakistan will run out of water by 2025. In simple words Pakistan is facing water shortage. For every drop we waste today, our generations will bear the consequences tomorrow. Use water wisely #SaveWater or Pakistan will run out of water by 2025. As scary, as it sounds and equally complicated.

#savewater #savewaterforpak #water scarcity

[monirtalukder-blog]

http://earnwithtalukder.com/affiliatemarketing/

100% Free Affiliate Marketing Learn from the best expert in the world

Affiliate Marketing is so easy with yoonla. Just registration and follow up expert director!I was looking out for some legit online money making opportunities on the web and encountered a new website referred to me on an online forum. The website name was Yoonla CPA Foundation. So I signed up for it and to my amazement, the whole system is so friendly that you can get started and start making money within just one day. Keeping all of this in view, I decided to write a complete Yoonla Review in order help out you guys if it’s a legit money making opportunity or not. Earn up to $4 per member lead.

For This Course Registration bellow link।

How open a account showing bellow step by step। Follow the bellow steps

Step 1: Your Name and Email Id input Here

Step-2: Open Your Register Email a confirmation mail will be come in your inbox or Spam or Junk Folder. It will be take some time but will come) click Activate my Account › Click This Link

Step-3: Click after uper director then come below page. Give your registered mail & new password and active your account

Now loging and starting seeing video and pdf from expert and earn

Once satisfied, I signed up for it and It’s been about couple of months since I joined this website and this below is the experience that I’ve had till yet. In fact, this article is a Yoonla Review that I’m sure you guys will find helpful to decide if it’s a legitimate income opportunity or a scam.

What can you learn?

How to create a successful internet-centric business

Select the product and select the necessary tools.

Prepare strategic camping

Creating Custom Landing Pages (Optin Page) and Marketing Funnel

Take the most strategic / effective steps in marketing

Find out a custom domain and connect it with funnel and autoresponder

Add custom funnel to affiliate offer

Drive your campaign traffic and start earning commissions

How to bring your site visitors with money or free.

How to Create an Interesting Website

With traffic - much more ..

To begin this course you only have to register on their site. Which is very simple. If you only know how to post on Facebook or create a Facebook account, it will not be difficult for you to do this. Yet how to register

About Yoonla and Yoonla and Yoonla MarketingWhat Yoonla is All About

Yoonla basically is a two tiered CPA based affiliate program where you make money once any one of the two actions are performed. 1. Any person signs up for Yoonla (using your affiliate link) 2. Person upgrades to VIP member So this is what two tiered means when it comes to Yoonla. You earn commission when the user signs up for the program as well as when your referral upgrades and becomes a VIP member. Before going into the details of this program, let’s talk about who actually is the owner or creator of this program.

Who is the founder of Yoonla?

The founder of Yoonla is Reno Van Boven. From New Zealand, he is a seasoned Digital Entrepreneur and and internet marketeer with quite a few successful online marketing projects under his belt since 2006. Reno Van Boven – Digital Entrepreneur/Business Coach

How Yoonla works?

As stated above, it’s very simple, you have to sign up for Yoonla and become its member. Once done, you will be provided with an affiliate link to promote Yoonla. Now, if any person signs up using your affiliate link, you will bag commission for every successful sign up. If the same person decides to upgrade and becomes a VIP member, you will earn further commission. Straight and simple. This website pays you up to $30 per VIP member Click here

Is there any cost of joining Yoonla?

Nope. Not at all. But stay with me here. There is some investments that you will have to most likely make in order to reap the maximum benefits of this program. So what are the benefits? I’ll mention below. So keep reading.

Is there any more to it?

So in addition to signing up and then convincing others to sign up, is there any more to this Yoonla program? There should be otherwise it does not seem to be such a great affiliate program. Right? (Read how you can monetize your blog with this great affiliate marketing platform) Well, you see, the very essence and the best advantage of signing up for Yoonla is that this platform proves to be a great starting point in your online money making world. If anything that can be considered priceless in any business it surely must be your leads. Without them, it is hard to thrive and succeed and when it comes to the online world, these leads come in the form of email addresses. So the best thing about Yoonla is that it provides series of training videos to get started and tells you how you can capture new leads. That’s not it. Yoonla also provides you with 3 digital products to promote so that it becomes easier for you to get the email addresses of the visitors. Of course, people are more likely to give their email addresses when you offer them something in return and Yoonla takes care of your part of the bargain by giving away 3 digital products about marketing. Yoonla Digital Products And this is exactly where you will have to take out your credit cards and invest some of your money. Yoonla will ask you to sign up for domain, web hosting and an auto-responder. Once done, you will have to hand over the credentials to the Yoonla team who will set the whole thing up and place their products on your web hosting. So you cannot regard this cash outflow as an expense. In fact it’s a genuine investment which is going to benefit you not only for Yoonla but any other endeavors as well. One important thing to understand is that, “there’s no free lunch”. If you want to make money, you will have to spend money. That’s the basic rule and the sooner you understand the better it is. If you are looking forward to make a career in affiliate marketing and on the internet then there are certain investments that you will have to make and when it comes to Yoonla, the investment is not that much.

How much do you need to spend to get started with Yoonla?

Again, to get started, you need to invest nothing. The investment only needs to be made if you want to be more effective. So the total investment that you need to make can be sum up as follows: 1. Domain = USD $15.00 per year 2. Web Hosting = USD $1.99/month (but this is subject to change) 3. Get Response Auto Responder = USD $15.00/month Let’s suppose you buy a domain and web hosting for a year and sign up for Get Response to pay on monthly basis. In yearly terms, your total investment will be: $15.00 + $23.88 ($1.99 x 12 months) + $180 ($15.00 x 12) = $218.88 If you divide them with 12 months, your monthly investment will be: $218.88 / 12 months = $18.24 That’s not much. Right? Especially when you see the benefits that you will get in return.

How much commission do you make per lead/referral?

The amount of commission depends on the country from which you are getting your leads to sign up. In Yoonla there are 3 categories. Countries with zero (0) commission 1. India 2. Pakistan 3. Nigeria 4. Zambia 5. Zimbabwe 6. Niger 7. Uganda The above countries will not generate any CPA lead commissions however, this does not mean that you cannot become a member if you are from one of these countries. You surely can. Secondly, you will get commission if the person from any of these countries sign up and become VIP. Countries with maximum ($4) commission 1. USA 2. UK 3. Australia 4. New Zealand 5. Canada 6. Ireland Countries with moderate ($2) commission Any country which is not in the above two lists will generate you around $2 per member lead. Having mentioned all of the details about the Yoonla program, I’m sure there must be a million dollar question tingling in your mind and that’s:

Though this Yoonla Review is not about how Yoonla makes money but rather how we can make money using Yoonla, but I get it. We humans are curious beings. We take interest in other’s lives, how they live, what they eat, when do they sleep etc. This give us pleasure. And the urge to know the answer grows by many folds when the entity is affecting our lives as well so here we go, here’s how Yoonla makes money. First, the web hosting and Get Response auto responder that I mentioned above, yoonla provides a link to them. So when you sign up for these services using their links, Yoonla makes money in return. Second, if any referral or member upgrades to VIP, Yoonla makes money. I think that’s quite obvious. Yoonla VIP program values around $297 USD. So you can do the maths. Third, though this benefit is non-monetary but I think I cannot stress the importance of leads enough. So whenever a person becomes a member of Yoonla, gets the lead in form of email address. This contact information can come in handy for other products that Reno might want to commercialize. So the value of this cannot be estimated in absolute terms. So here are the 3 ways (at least that I know of) from which Yoonla makes money.

$50. After a particular cycle when all the leads are evaluated for their legitimacy, commissions are credited to one’s account. Yoonla currently pays only through Paypal but soon they will be utilizing other payment methods as well. Read Review of CB Passive Income 4.0 by Patric Chan

Since this post already too long, I should better end it. but before doing so, I’d like to appreciate Reno (Yoonla) for one thing. As said at the beginning of the article, I’ve seen many affiliate programs and majority of them guarantees you to make you rich over night and try to convince you of that by posing and taking pictures with bikini clad women, in front of sports cars or from some 5-star Las Vegas hotel. I’ve seen this happening too many times that this has become more or less a cliche for an online money making programs. However, when it comes to Reno or Yoonla, they don’t guarantee any such thing nor display any such enticing photos to lure and rightfully so as the success and failure depends on your determination and how much you make from promoting Yoonla, depends largely on your PR. Any platform is there to just guide you and is as good as your will power and determination to move forward and keep going no matter what. So if you are really convinced from the Yoonla CPA program, go ahead and sign up by clicking here. IT REALLY IS A LEGIT PROGRAM.

Any Question or help join

Facebook Link

Terms & Condition |

Privacy & Policy |

Contact Us

#http://earnwithtalukder.com/digitalmarketing/

[clubofinfo]

Expert: While war is perceived by many as an inherent institution of the nation state, few people fail to recognize and regret the horror, death, destruction, suffering, and misery it inflicts. Another consequence of war, however, is less often considered, though it is in the long run even more damaging to the cause of human well-being. That is the waste of resources in preparing for, and waging, war that could otherwise be used to help meet the physical, economic, social, and cultural needs of ordinary people. According to a reliable online information source, the U.S. accounted for 37 percent, or about $592 billion, of the more than $1.6 trillion in world military spending in 2015. That outlay amounts to roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets combined. (On September 11, 2017, a new defense spending authorization bill calling for a budget of $692 billion in fiscal year 2018 was introduced into the U.S. Senate.) Moreover, it has been estimated that overall annual U.S. military spending is actually about $1 trillion, when funding is counted not only for the Pentagon but for Homeland Security and other related government departments and agencies. In addition, the U.S. has spent approximately $2 trillion in direct costs for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That figure is itself raised to an estimated $6 trillion when indirect expenditures are added–such as future care of veterans and lost domestic investment opportunities. If those dollars were made available instead for investments to meet the direct needs of people, a substantial portion could be used in our own country to help adequately fund two important projects: the long-neglected rebuilding of our crumbling physical infrastructure, and systematic progress toward a more cost-effective and environmentally-healthy green economy. Besides making life better for everyone, both investments would generate millions of new, good-paying jobs. Other diverted defense dollars could be used to fund projects abroad that help meet the basic needs of underdeveloped countries—such as food, clean water, medicine, agriculture, sustainable energy, and education. Those initiatives could greatly enhance the American image with the people of those countries, and, by providing young males a basis of hope for the future, reduce the allure of political extremism and help ease the threats to our own country posed by international terrorism. The diversion of defense funds to meet human needs would also eliminate two deleterious characteristics of the war industry: * It is economically unfair. It shuttles public funds into increasingly privatized industries, which are subject to little public accounting and tend to place huge profits in the hands of corporate owners and directors. * It endangers both the environment and human survival. The U.S., with only 5% of the world’s population, consumes a quarter to a third of the world’s oil and other natural resources—much of it needed for war-making. This rate of consumption will ruin the earth’s climate and ecosystems long before its supply of fossil fuels and other natural resources are exhausted. Moreover, we can’t in any case continue to make use of the weapons produced by the war industry to further our exploitation of the natural resources of foreign lands. If we accept the scientific consensus that global warming is real and produced by human activity, our survival depends on a shift to renewable energy, or on the use of less energy. And that depends in turn on investing public funds now wasted on the preparation for war in efforts to find clean-energy solutions. It can’t be denied, of course, that spending dollars on developing and building ever more sophisticated and lethal war machinery does create jobs for lots of people. Those beneficiaries, however, represent only a small percentage of the total population. Spending the same dollars on peaceful industries such as education, green energy, and infrastructure rebuilding would make good-paying jobs available to many more people—while leaving enough savings to provide training and other assistance to help everyone in the war industry make the transition to non-war-related work. A Decline in War Spending Is Also a First Step Toward Peace and the End of War   Another potential benefit of U.S. demilitarization is suggested by the results of a global survey conducted by WIN/Gallup International and released in 2014. In a poll of residents in 68 countries, 24 percent of the countries ranked the U.S. as the greatest threat to world peace. The U.S. ranking was followed by Pakistan at 8 percent, China at 6 percent, and four countries (Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, and North Korea) tied at 5 percent. Given this highly disproportionate fear of U.S. aggression, a demonstrated U.S. commitment to demilitarization might well trigger a reverse arms race by nations throughout the world. This is the more likely, because no other countries (and that includes Russia!) are aggressively seeking to maintain a global empire, and therefore probably maintain a military establishment only for reasons of defense and/or national pride. In the absence of an American threat, such nations might be only too happy to divert funds now spent on defense to investments that develop their own economic strength and meet other needs of their population. To make that possible, they could then seek to negotiate legally-binding bilateral or multilateral agreements for gradual disarmament. If such a course were pursued, it is highly probable that, among nuclear states, including the U.S., nuclear weapons–the most dangerous, costly, and least likely to be used of all weapons—would be the first to go. That result would not only finally put an end to a now seven-decades-old nuclear nightmare, but encourage consideration of further benefits that can be obtained by the elimination of all weapons of war. From the standpoint of physical security, the most important benefit of disarmament would be a massive reduction in the use of climate-damaging fossil fuels. To recap three points made earlier: * The development, testing, and use of military weapons consume vast amounts of fossil fuels. * Gaining or maintaining access to oil resources from which the fossil fuels derive can be a significant factor in instigating war. * The U.S. Department of Defense is the biggest single consumer of fossil fuels in the world. In light of these realities, Americans need to ask themselves two questions: Why should we continue an institution of mass killing in order to maintain access to natural resources that will ruin the earth if war doesn’t destroy it first? And, if we are going to adequately counter climate change and environmental collapse, aren’t we going to need the nearly $2 trillion a year the world now spends on preparing for war? A shift in public spending from war to peace could also promote unprecedented international cooperation in helping to meet the real needs of people around the world. Here are two ideas I’ve picked up in my research: * By diverting $500 billion of the roughly $1 trillion we now spend annually on war to meet the real needs of Americans, we could end college debt, provide housing for everyone, rebuild our physical infrastructure, and fund sustainable green energy and agricultural practices. * With the other $500 billion, we could provide the world with food and water, green energy, infrastructure, topsoil preservation, environmental protection, schools, medicine, cultural exchange programs, and the study of peace and non-violent conflict resolution. Even much smaller investments to help poor or underdeveloped countries around the world could pay huge dividends. * Today, the U.S. spends just $23 billion a year on non-war-related foreign aid. It would cost just $7 billion more–about $30 billion a year–to end starvation and hunger around the world, and $11 billion a year to provide clean water to all populations in the world that don’t now have it. * By raising this spending to $100 billion, we could save many lives, greatly reduce suffering, and make ourselves the most beloved nation on earth–perhaps even removing ourselves thereby as a target of terrorist attacks. For fairness, however, even such a modest investment aimed at global rescue and well-being should also include the struggling millions in our own country. As suggested by the global poll that picked the U.S. as by far the greatest danger to world peace, it seems evident that at least much of the world wants nothing to do with America’s current role as the world’s policeman. What it does undoubtedly want is what most Americans want for themselves: to live in peace, to enjoy a decent standard of living, and to have opportunities to develop and apply their own creative talents. It is perhaps an interesting irony that by diverting our defense dollars from policing the world to helping our fellow humans live a better life, we can best ensure our own security. A Choice We Have To Make War seems to me an obvious product of the nation we live in. America consists fundamentally of interlinked centers of economic, social, cultural, media, military, and political power that operate within an overarching national system dedicated to controlling the world in its own interest. Each of these centers is characterized by a prevailing group-think that is reinforced by competitive careerism. You have to go along not only to get along—but to get ahead. This mindset ensures that each center of power toes the system line, leaving its functionaries little capacity to empathize with those outside the power system or to walk a mile in their moccasins. As expressed in international relations, that same mindset leads all of the power centers—including the mass media, who should be America’s conscience!–to demonize adversaries, stand averse to conciliation with them, and to consider war a natural option for advancing the nation’s interests. I had an experience the other day, however, that renewed my hope that things can change. I watched a short video that offered a glimpse into an elementary-school classroom in Russia. The focus of that glimpse was a young chap who asked an American visitor in halting, but understandable, English how American kids at age ten celebrate Halloween. He wanted to know especially about the trick-or-treat aspect, revealing that, when he had made that a part of his own Halloween practice in Russia, people didn’t open their door. In watching the video, I was struck by how completely the innocence, friendliness, and eagerness to please of the Russian school children resembled that of the children in American elementary-school classrooms I have visited as a father and grandfather. That perception of the common humanity of our species behind its cultural differences reminded me again of why war, or even the threat of war, is an abomination. I find it difficult to accept that the friendly outreach of the little boy in the Russian classroom, and by children throughout the world, should ever give way to an acceptance of war as a natural part of human outlook and behavior. As those of us who hate war pursue the challenging, though we believe not unattainable, goal of its worldwide abolition, we too, like the civil rights marchers of the 1960s, have to keep our eyes on the prize. It can be found every day in the eyes of all the children of the world who reach out to it with curiosity and expectation. http://clubof.info/

[spanlish-blog]

White Privilege as a Western Student in China

When some friends of mine came back from an exchange program in Beijing, each with a wad of $1,200 in cash they'd received from the Chinese government, my response was, "Um, what?"

The cash was their scholarship money, given to them in crisp 100 yuan bills after class one day.

Turns out you don't need a 4.0—or even a 2.5—to get that kind of money. After interviewing several more exchange students about their experiences in China, I learned that even if your grades are "shit," you might still be offered a scholarship, free accommodation, and a monthly allowance to study in the Middle Kingdom.

You may also get free booze, free entry into clubs, and professors who won't care if you skip class or use your phone during an exam. These are tough things to resist when you're a broke college student who'd rather explore the city than actually attend your lectures.

"Foreigners enjoy a very favorable situation in China, for sure," says Jon*, who worked at a Chinese university as a liaison between international business students and the staff. "If you go to a club, yes, you'll get free drinks, and you'll get in for free. Whereas Chinese people still have to pay."

These perks are a way for China to make itself more appealing to foreigners, who, Jon says, are still viewed by Chinese citizens as "super powers" and also enjoy advantages like higher wages and better job opportunities than locals.

But according to students I spoke with, not all exchange students are treated equally. While white skin awards you near-celebrity status, black skin might get you spat on outside a McDonald's or labeled as "dangerous." You might also be sized up according to your assumed race and gender at clubs, then treated in accordance with that value.

Hello again, white privilege.

For the purposes of global education, VICE has included six stories about what it's really like to live and study in China and why being treated like a VIP can either be wildly fun or weirdly dehumanizing.

Ashton*, 25 Exchange Student From: Germany Program: Marketing

In 2015, I went on a six-month exchange program to China. I really had no restrictions at the university. You're late? It's fine. You want to change your exam date? Fine. It's easy to use; "this is how we do things in Germany" as a justification for anything. Even bringing your phone to an exam. I'm actually going back there for my master's degree because it'll be easy for me to get good grades. I tried to find a program in Germany or the Netherlands, but it was really difficult because my grades are shit. When I asked my old university in China if they had any programs in management, they said: "Yes, of course, we'll give you a scholarship." They're also giving me free housing, an allowance per month, and no tuition fees. So I said, "OK, yeah, I'm coming back." But all this makes you feel pretty weird because while a lot of non-white foreigners are just so fucking happy to have the chance to come to China, you're only there because it's free. For example, I'm in a WhatsApp group with 40 people who have applied for scholarships in China. There are three Westerners and 37 people from either Africa, Bangladesh, or Pakistan. The only people who got replies from the university were the three Westerners.

Before my trip, I'd heard China preferred foreigners at clubs, but I didn't understand the racism until I went there. My ex-girlfriend was a promoter at one of these clubs—she sold guest list spots to people—and got paid according to what types of people she brought in. Non-Western foreigners were level one and worth nearly nothing to promoters. The second level was Western foreigners, and the third level was pretty girls. So there was a man at the door checking "is she pretty or not pretty?" and if she was pretty, the promoter would get more money for bringing her in. The last level was models—like real models, ones staying in Beijing for shoots and stuff. Promoters would get about $20 for bringing them in.

It's also normal to get free drinks the whole night if you're white. For my farewell party, we went to a club, and there were ten people, six of them blond girls. We got two bottles of Grey Goose—worth about $300 in that club—all for free. I felt like a king at first, but it was also really weird. They were catering to our every need, and we didn't pay a thing.

It's hard to enter certain clubs if you're with black people. I have a friend from Mozambique, and once we went to a really nice club and booked a table in advance. We all met at the entrance—five Westerners and one black person—and the promoter was like, "Yeah, you cannot enter." When we asked why, he told us it was because my friend looked dangerous, which was just crazy. We argued with the guy for about 15 minutes and told him that if he didn't let us in, we'd post on WeChat that the club was racist, and so he finally let us in. From there, it was open bar all night.

Sami, 25 Exchange Student from: Finland Studying: Law

I studied international and Chinese law in Beijing, and the first night I was there, I went out with some master's students, and they took us out to a street filled with different clubs. We got in free to all of the clubs; all the alcohol was free, and we got VIP tables. That first night I was like, "Woah, what is this?" I'm not sure if it felt wrong, but it felt weird. There'd be big lines of Chinese people waiting to get in, and we'd walk right by. Also, we went to this pretty famous club in the center of Shanghai—it's called M1NT, they've got sharks in the dance floor—and again, we just walked past this huge line, got VIP cards, and also free alcohol the whole night. Just because we were European. All the free stuff and better treatment was fun in the beginning, but in the long run, it felt... it didn't feel good.

I got preferential treatment outside the party scene, too. When my parents came to visit, we went to a restaurant that was a little fancier. I didn't book a reservation, and so there was a two-hour wait when we got there. We thought, Well, that's OK, we'll go shopping for a bit. But when we left, the staff came running after us and said, "Wait, we have a free table for you." We thought that since it was just the three of us, maybe a small table had opened up and that's why we got in, but inside there was a whole other room full of Chinese people still waiting. Throughout the meal we had four waiters serving us, people taking photos of us, and the whole experience was very strange. In China, you're often perceived as super rich if you're Western. They think you have a lot of money and you're there to party, and that's it. It gets annoying because in reality most of us are there because of grants, scholarships, and wanting to travel; we even take out loans to do it.

Erin*, 24 Exchange Student from: Canada Studying: Law

My boyfriend and I chose to study abroad in Beijing this past summer through a program where Chinese government scholarships are available for Canadian students. Being fairly poor law students who love to travel, we were pretty intrigued by the idea of government funding.

We didn't know when we would be getting our scholarship—$1,200—or even how it would be given to us. We didn't get anything when we arrived, which we thought was a little odd, but then during our last week, a Chinese student came to the front of the class and was like, "Hey, everyone, your money's here!" Everyone cheered. Then the next day they brought in cash—stacks of freshly printed 100 yuan bills, all put into envelopes and stored up in the program administrator's office. So, 80 students lined up in the hallway, all waiting for their $1,200. Considering you can buy lunch for the equivalent of $0.80, it was a ton of money to have in cash.

Edson, 21 Exchange Student from: Africa Studying: Accounting

There aren't many black people in China. I didn't want to study abroad there, but in recent years China has been investing a lot in Africa, so our government has started giving scholarships to students. From the moment I got there, things were just really different. I walked out of the airport, and my nose just started itching. There was so much pollution. I thought instantly: This place isn't good for me. Then came the stares on the train. People look at you as if you're really, really different; they've never seen someone like you, and so they take pictures.

China is growing economically, about 6 percent every year, but I don't think it's a good place to study. Some foreigners really like it because of all the free stuff. I mean, I still got the free drinks and free entry into the clubs, but it would depend on what kind of club it was and who I was with. I was with a bunch of friends from the Netherlands most times, and so I was viewed as part of their group. Actually, most people would assume that since I'm black and speak English, I must be American. And if you're American or European, Chinese girls love it, but I didn't like the attention because I'd rather be liked for who I am. The fact is if you tell them you're African, you're viewed as poor, like you don't know what an iPhone is, etc.

There were only two black people in the entire university, which was a problem for me. I would invite people in my class to go to clubs, or I'd say, "Hey, let's grab a drink or something," because I wanted to make friendships with the Chinese students. But they'd say they had to go to the library. Every time it was the same: "I have to go to the library." I tried to make friends, but they didn't let me in. Eventually, I met some people from Europe and just hung out with them. And so I didn't go to a lot of classes. My teachers never gave me a hard time about it because I think they knew it was difficult fitting in. I could do whatever I wanted. In that way, I was treated basically the same as the white students.

I remember one very sad day in particular. In China, they have a habit of spitting on the floor, and so one day I went to McDonald's and bought a Big Mac. As I was leaving, there was a Chinese man who spit on my shirt. I don't know why he did it. Anyway, I thought maybe it was a mistake, but when I looked at him, he didn't say sorry, just gave a look like "I don't like you" or something. I was sad but also angry. I didn't do anything, just walked away. And that was when I thought, You know, I can't put up with this bullshit anymore. It's too hard. I wasn't OK with myself over there.

Jackie*, 26 Exchange Student from: Canada Studying: Law

I went on a summer exchange program to China, and afterward, I got an internship at a big law firm in Beijing. At the firm, some other interns and I would get invited every week or two to go have dinner with a group of lawyers from the firm. They'd bring us to these fancy restaurants, and they'd pay the bill, and you knew it wasn't the type of dinner they were inviting their Chinese colleagues to every week. We got invites because we were international interns. And even though I was the only white person in this particular group of interns, I was the only one they invited personally, and from there, they allowed me to bring friends. Once, during dinner, the woman who invited us was really making sure we were having a good time. She even started to dance and sing. Often, my friends and I would go out as a big group, and night after night our table would be given several bottles of spirits, solely based on the color of our skin. Some people in my group would abstain from drinking because it was discriminatory, like white privilege at its finest. That's the kind of racial privilege caucasian people have access to in Beijing. That said, we always hear that China is taking a bigger place in the world and its economy, and so it's good to go there and see what's behind these great firewalls that prevent us from exchanging with them.

There's also a local version of Tinder, it's called Tantan, and if you're a foreigner, this app can really open some doors if you're looking to meet new people. Some of the people in my group were using it, and every single time they'd swipe, they'd get a swipe back in return. If you're white, it just isn't the same game.

Shaun, 26 Exchange Student from: Canada Studying: Law

During my exchange program, I was photographed quite often. I remember being approached three distinct times, and each time it happened at a pretty big tourist attraction. I'm tall and caucasian, and from what I heard, Chinese people are interested in photographing someone like me because by doing so they can show their family and friends that the places they're visiting have such a high status that they attract white Westerners as well. It's like, "Look, this place is so cool, even this white guy went there!" I just kind of went along with it because I didn't feel like it was doing any harm, but it always felt a little awkward. It's like, why me? It's uncomfortable to be this, well, image of beauty or whatever. But I also think it's learned behavior culturally. One time my girlfriend and I were approached by a family, and the mother and grandmother were super into getting a picture with us, but their six-year-old daughter wanted nothing to do with it. It was like she hadn't learned the rule about wanting photos with white people.

*Names have been changed.

Follow Mica Lemiski on Twitter.

Source: White Privilege as a Western Student in China Source: White Privilege as a Western Student in China

#vice

[salesmandiary]

Murlikant Petkar

Starting Blog with some question ?????

    Do you know Mr. Murlikant Petkar or Have you ever heard about him ????? ( If not Don’t worry you’ll know each & every detail about him in Few Months, A Biopic is planned on His life & Sushant Singh Rajput is playing lead)

    Who is first person who won Individual Gold Medal in any Form of Olympics ???? Sadly many of us don’t know about, some may say Abhinav Bindra & in Paralympics Mr. Devendra Jhajharia who won recently last year.

    Many of us don’t know about Mr. Murlikant Petkar, I was also not aware till I saw one old Interview of Rahul Dravid where he mentioned his Name & shared some glimpse about his life. I am surprise why Movie is not been made on his Life, If you read his life story it will have all elements.

He has shared his life journey with Mr. Sanjay Mishra & is available in book Courage beyond Compare.

Here I am sharing few glimpse of His Life Journey.

He is born in 1947 in Islampur Village in Maharashtra’s Sangali District.

    From childhood he was interested in Sports from Hockey, football, to rural sports like gilli- danda, kabaddi, kho kho etc. Satara belt is famous for Wrestling & joined local akhada which was run by Ganpat Rao Khedkar. He was enjoying in Training & wanted to become professional Wrestler at that time his age was only 12 Years old. But Life took an amazing Turn (according to him it was amazing)

    Murli took part in Exhibition Bout in Local Dangal ( Now we all know what Dangal is) & competed against Shivaji Patil ( Son of Headman of Village where Dangal was taking place) but it became competitive & he defeated Shivaji convincingly.

    Someone in the crowd shouted Khedkar deliberately trained Murli to defeat Shivaji so that Headman of Village looks small in front of whole Village & even turned ugly & crowd started braying for blood of Murli. Khedkar assessing the situation ran away towards Highway. Murli took lift in Truck & landed in Pune where he hardly knows any one.

    Next day morning he went to one of his relative & stays at his place for a week, after a week his uncle took him to local Army recruitment Centre, on same day he was made to be part of the Boys Battalion of Army & at 4 pm he was put to train to Bangalore. Year was 1960, He was just 12 Years old not even Teenager.

    Within a year or so he became really good at Hockey & scored many goals for his battalion. He was dropped twice from Karnataka team because He was Maratha boy & they wanted local boy from Karnataka. Upset with this treatment he vowed never to play hockey again & started taking interest in martial arts, boxing & hand to hand combat training. His favourite sport was boxing because there either your teeth got broke or you broke opponent’s teeth, No Bhaigiri as in Hockey. He was so good at it that very soon he won all major Tournaments & was selected to represent to Indian Army at the International Service Sports meet to be held in Tokyo. He went to the Final of event where he faced boy from Uganda who hit him so hard in second round that He was knocked out for two days but he learnt a lot from that Trip & continued to play in nationals & won Tournaments.

    The General Officer Commanding Southern Command was sportsman himself & was very happy with National Title Murli won for his Command. As a reward he was asked to go on Trip sponsored by the Army & he asked to go to Kashmir. This one decision was to change Murli’s life yet again totally & in the most dramatic fashion.

    Along with ten other boys Murli landed in Kashmir & transferred to the 108 Gurkha regiment. He visited few places. On his tenth day every one heard long wail of Siren which was actually war siren announcing unprovoked attack by Pakistan Air Force (PAF). Gurkha Regiment was so closed to Border & was a priority target for the PAF. Many soldiers died on the spot. Their Leader Halvinder Gurung Thapa immediately ordered to battalion along with Murli to take defensive position to the front of Sialkot.

    In a firing from top from Pakistani Force he was hit by nine bullets. One bounced of his skull fracturing it, one skid past his right cheekbone dampening his eye. One hit his spine & lodged there, while one went through the shoulder. Both thighs were hit and both calves as well. The impact of bullets was such that he was thrown from his position to the road below and there an army jeep passing by could not stop in time & went over my leg. He screamed in pain & lost consciousness thereafter.

    His condition was so bad that he had been shifted from one hospital to another and landed in Delhi after some seventeen months. He had lost his memory and did not remember his own name.

    One day he was lying at the edge of his bed & got knocked off the bed and hit his head hard on the floor. Unbelievably and in true Bollywood style, he suddenly regained his memory & remembered everything and he was informed that he was 95% paralyzed & no control on urination & bowl movement & wheelchair bound for Life. He was just nineteen years old at that time & undergone seven major surgeries & one bullet still lodged in his spine which Doctor refused to remove for the danger it would pose to the spinal cord. On his request he was shifted to Maharashtra & shifted to INS Ashwini – Navy’s premium Hospital in Mumbai. This was going to change in his life big way.

    At INS Ashwini he fell into a daily schedule which saw him swimming and playing other sports like shot put, archery, table tennis, javelin etc, Swimming was basically a therapy to strengthen his back & shoulders.

    Somewhere in middle of 1967 he finally meets his parents who came along with his Elder brother. They were aghast seeing his condition. His father & brother were shell shocked and didn’t talk with him at first. He told them that he was now thinking of leaving Army as it had no place for a handicapped Soldier & he would like to join school back home, educate himself & try to be earning member, His brother said no one can take care of you as he had no control on his bowl moment & he would be burden on family because he is Langda, His father kept quite & mother kept crying. He was so hurt with this outburst.

    He was so disturbed with the event he decided to commit suicide by swallowing lots of sleeping pills, On the day when he decided to end his life Hospital sweeper came running to him & ask for 10 rupees to play Matka (Gambling), Sweeper requested him to also play. He agreed & gives Rs. 100 instead of Rs. 10 to sweeper & another 100 from his side for gambling & asked to put money on One Number more than sweeper.

    He gulped Sleeping pills along with Alcohol but destiny took another turn he didn’t died of it & vomited next day morning till his stomach was empty. At around 9 AM sweeper came screaming with joy along with someone to his room & informed him that he ( Murlikant) had won Rs. 40,000/- in Gambling. He was stunned & didn’t know how to react & to his surprise first time after long time he felt sensation and need to urinate. He donated all money to National Association of Blind.

    After giving away all money he decided to start his new life & decided to do well in sports. With help of his coach Jawahar & Vijay Merchant Trust he started Swimming at Navy pool in Colaba, with nothing else to do whole day he started playing archery, shot put, javelin, table tennis, wheel chair racing etc.

    He started playing in competitive paraplegic events & won Gold Medal in archery, table tennis, Shot put, discus throw, javelin throw & weight lifting in State Championship. He won four Gold Medals in National Paraplegic Games between 1968 to 1973. Realising his potential Coach Jawahar thought he could be medal Winners at International Event. He started Training,

    He took part in 1969 Stoke Mendeville International Paraplegic Meet, He entered in fifty meter freestyle swimming & shot put, & won very first International Gold medal for India in Paraplegic Games & medal was given by Queen Elizabeth. Same year he went to Mexico & also won Gold Medal there in Swimming.

    He was qualified for 50 meter free style swimming; javelin & shot put throw in 1970 Commonwealth Games. Broke Commonwealth Game Record & won Gold Medal in Swimming, Silver in javelin throw & Bronze in Shot put. In 1971 Stoke Mendeville International Paraplegic Meet he once again won Gold in Swimming & Silver in Javelined throw.

    Than he started preparing for 1972 Paralympic Games which were to be held immediately after Munich Olympics. He reached to the Finals in Swimming & made India proud by Winning India’s first ever Individual Gold Medal & set new World Record. No one has come so far one Individual Gold Medal either abled or disabled Olympics.

    A few months later he decided to leave the Army & later joined TELCO but continued playing National & International Meets. From 1973 to 1984 he continued to dominate.

    Winner of Gold Medal at Asian, Commonwealth & Paralympic Games from India, you might be thinking he has won all rewards & recognitions but He was recommended for Arjuna Award for 1973, 1974 & 1975, But for unknown reason He was denied with Arjuna Award. He was even overlooked for Rajeev Gandhi Khel Ratna Award. In 1974 he was allotted some Land by Government of Maharashtra which was later taken back by Government.

    So even after bringing so much Pride & Glory to country sadly we as a Country couldn’t give respect he undoubtedly deserved. We even don’t know who he is. But we all will definitely know him once Movie will be released.

He is definitely unsung Hero & his life story will definitely inspire us.

  ed_stor�֍x)