Stocks bounce back to record highs as tech companies rise – Los Angeles Times

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U.S. stocks bounced back to record highs Tuesday as investors put an end to a two-day drop for technology companies. Energy and consumer-focused companies also made outsize gains.

In a reversal from the two previous days, investors put money into companies that stand to benefit from faster economic growth, including retailers; makers of basic materials such as paints and chemicals; energy companies; and banks. Big-dividend companies, which are usually considered safer investments, did not do as well as the rest of the market.

Tech companies reversed their losses from Monday, although they remain well below their peak from last week.

There's no question that the rally in that sector can continue as long as investors' sentiment remains positive, said Brian Rehling, co-head of global fixed income strategy at Wells Fargo Investment Institute. Rehling said he believes tech stocks are too high, but not by a huge amount.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 10.96 points, or 0.5%, to 2,440.35. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 92.80 points, or 0.4%, to 21,328.47.

The Nasdaq composite, which has a large concentration of technology companies, rose 44.90 points, or 0.7%, to 6,220.37, but did not get back to its record highs. The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks advanced 6.77 points, or 0.5%, to 1,425.98.

Technology companies led the way. Facebook rose 1.5% to $150.68. Microsoft ticked up 1.2% to $70.65. Hard drive maker Western Digital climbed 3.9% to $90.05.

Even after their recent skid, technology companies have done much better than the rest of the market in 2017. Big tech firms such as Apple and Alphabet, Googles parent company, have been responsible for a huge portion of the stock market's gains this year.

Amazon helped retailers rise. The online giant rose 1.6% to $980.79. Best Buy climbed 1.9% to $57.85, and Home Depot advanced 1.2% to $153.99.

Among materials companies, Dow Chemical jumped 2% to $65.26 and Sherwin-Williams rose 1.5% to $353.25.

Energy companies joined the gains as the price of oil reversed an early loss. U.S. crude futures rose 38 cents to settle at $46.46 a barrel. Brent crude, used to price international oils, ticked up 43 cents to $48.72 a barrel.

Among energy stocks, Halliburton climbed 2% to $45.84 and oil refiner Tesoro increased 3.3% to $94.22.

Wholesale gasoline rose 1 cent to $1.50 a gallon. Heating oil rose 2 cents to $1.45 a gallon. Natural gas slumped 6 cents, or 1.9%, to $2.97 per 1,000 cubic feet.

The Federal Reserve began a two-day policy meeting Tuesday. On Wednesday, investors expect the central bank to raise interest rates for the third time since December. Rehling, of the Wells Fargo Investment Institute, said investors will scrutinize the Fed's views on inflation and how aggressive it will be in raising interest rates in the future.

The market's going to be looking to see if they're still on track, he said. Investors also want to know about the Fed's plan to start reducing its huge portfolio of bonds, he said. He doesn't think that will have much effect on the bond market.

Information technology company Science Applications International Corp. slumped 8.5% to $74.52 after its sales fell short of Wall Street's projections. The company said tight budgets for customers are hurting its sales, and greater costs affected its profit.

Restaurant chain Cheesecake Factory slid 9.9% to $52.58 after it said sales at established restaurants have fallen in the current quarter. Those sales, an important measure of how a retailer is doing, were down about 1%; FactSet says analysts expected growth of 1.7%.

Verizon officially bought Yahoo's Internet business for $4.5 billion, bringing an end to Yahoo's 21 years as a publicly traded company. Yahoo is being combined with AOL in a new Verizon unit called Oath, which is run by AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong. Verizon stock fell 1.5% to $46.46.

Bond prices edged up. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note slipped to 2.21% from 2.22%.

Gold fell 30 cents to $1,268.60 an ounce. Silver fell 18 cents, or 1%, to $16.77 an ounce. Copper fell 2 cents to $2.60 a pound.

The dollar rose to 109.96 yen from 109.79 yen. The euro inched up to $1.1212 from $1.1208.

Germany's DAX gained 0.6% and the CAC 40 in France advanced 0.4%. In Britain the FTSE 100 index lost 0.2%. Asian markets finished mostly higher. In South Korea the Kospi rose 0.7%, the Hang Seng in Hong Kong advanced 0.6%, and Japan's Nikkei 225 slipped 0.1%.

UPDATES:

2:15 p.m.: This article was updated with closing prices, context and analyst comment.

This article was originally published at 6:55 a.m.

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Stocks bounce back to record highs as tech companies rise - Los Angeles Times

This new technology can help predict if you’re going to die – Fox News

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Want to know if youll be dead in five years? Just let a computer look at your organs.

New research has indicated that future predicting computers could be coming to hospitals in the near future. Researchers are hoping that the technology could be used to predict serious illnesses and medical conditions such as heart attacks.

For the study, five yearold medical images of 48 patients chests were analyzed by artificial intelligence. From these images alone, the system was able to predict (with 69 percent accuracy) whether or not a patient would die within five years. It was also able to predict medical outcomes by analyzing large volumes of data and discovering subtle patterns. This new exambyAI has proven to be more effective than a physical exam from a doctor, though apparently its really not a fair fight.

MICROSOFT, OTHERS SPEARHEADING A 'SMART CITIES' INITIATIVE FOR EVERYONE

Human doctors are not trained to predict mortality, so the comparison is a bit unfair, study leader Dr. Luke OakdenRayner of the University of Adelaide told Fox News. OakdenRayner added that previous research using clincial data such as age, sex or physical fitness had between 65 percent and 75 percent accuracy, so the new study "compare[s] favorably, especially considering we excluded factors like age and sex from our analysis."

Currently the system is only trained to predict death within five years, although, according to OakdenRayner, with the right dataset it should be trivial to extend the technique to other time scales.

To predict mortality at ten years, for example, the system would need to analyze CT scans performed over ten years ago so that OakdenRayners team could have the follow up results. The researchers also couldnt tell what exactly it was the computers were seeing in the images to make their assessment, though they did find a strong relationship between the prediction of mortality and the presence of visible illnesses such as emphysema and congestive heart failure.

OakdenRayner explained that certain techniques could be applied to visualize how the computers were seeing the scans, but the study was too small to use them this goround.

You can identify the regions of the images that contributed to the prediction, and you can hallucinate images that exaggerate the features that the system uses (generating exemplars of "survival" and "mortality" scans), he said. We couldn't apply these techniques effectively due to our small dataset, but are currently applying them to a much larger group consisting of tens of thousands of patients.

ZAPPING YOUR BRAIN WITH ELECTRICITY CAN AID CREATIVITY -- BUT THERE'S A CATCH

For this next round of testing, OakdenRayner and his team will be incorporating highly predictive clinical information like age and sex into their models, which they expect will improve prediction accuracy.

Similar medical AI news has been cropping up lately: a startup in China revealed an AI system that can help doctors identify lung cancer by examining CT scans, and IBM now has AI in hospitals (called Watson) that can answers patient questions. However, if perfected, this new medical AI could be the most exciting development yet.

We will start looking at predicting other medical events before they happen, like strokes, cancer and heart attacks, OakdenRayner said.

The study can be found in "Scientific Reports."

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This new technology can help predict if you're going to die - Fox News

Touch-sensing technology born of CMU researchers grabs companies’ interest – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Touch-sensing technology born of CMU researchers grabs companies' interest
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
It took two years for researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to develop technology that can add touch-sensing capabilities to everyday objects and surfaces like toys, steering wheels and walls, but it did not take long for companies to express ...

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Touch-sensing technology born of CMU researchers grabs companies' interest - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

NBCUniversal, Fox Networks Group, ABC Make Early Progress in TV’s Upfront Market – Variety

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NBCUniversal, Fox Networks Group and ABC are making progress in the early stages of the annual haggling over upfront advertising sales, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The companies have all begun to sell ad inventory during the period in which U.S. TV networks seek to obtain commitments for the bulk of their commercial inventory for the upcoming season. Executives on both sides of the table caution that talks remain in their nascent stages and that buyers and TV networks continue to wrangle over pricing terms.

The major networks made initial requests for rate increases that buyers say they hope to resist. CBS and NBCUniversal initially sought increases in the cost of reaching 1,000 viewers a metric known as a CPM that is central to these annual talks between TV networks and Madison Avenue in the low double-digit percentage range for primetime inventory, according to people familiar with the talks. Fox and ABC have been seeking CPM hikes in the high-single-digit percentage range for primetime, sources said.

CBS and some cable companies have also begun to sell advance advertising commitments for their schedules. CBS has been asking for mid-to-high single-digit percentage increases, with cable networks working to tuck underneath what executives perceive broadcast networks are getting.

The nations five English-language broadcast networks last year secured between $8.41 billion and $9.25 billion in advance commitments for primetime in the upfront, according to Variety estimates the first time in three years they managed to break the $9 billion mark. The figures, of course, represent indications of advertisers intent to spend, not cold, hard cash. The final numbers typically show up in some form in year-end earnings reports.

Among negotiators, its generally understood that everything is flexible until significant deals are struck. The networks sought to force big rate increases that were quickly rejected by buyers. Everyone came out high with rate increases, said one top media buyer. Theres not a buyer who will stand for that.

The industry remains focused on NBCUniversal. As the company that has so many of TVs top-rated properties Sunday Night Football and This Is Us, for example NBC has a lot of the audience advertisers covet most. NBCU is also selling ads for the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics and Telemundos broadcasts of the World Cup.

As such, the rates NBCU accepts could influence what sorts of CPM hikes rivals are able to negotiate. There is no clarity on NBCU, and the ceiling they may be setting, said another buying executive. Once that matter is resolved, buyers suggested, the market could move more significantly.

Everyone wants to pay less than a year ago, but the question is how much less, this buyer said.

Fox Networks is seeing early interest in its FX cable network, according to one person familiar with talks and in a suite of new ad products the company unveiled at its May presentation. At that time, Joe Marchese, president of ad revenue for the 21st Century Fox-owned unit, called attention to Open A.P., a joint ad sales venture with Viacom and Turner that helps advertisers cut deals based on targeted audience segments sold across the three conglomerates, as well as promoting new commercial formats for programs offered via VOD.

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NBCUniversal, Fox Networks Group, ABC Make Early Progress in TV's Upfront Market - Variety

Officer’s Journey to Gay Pride Honoree Marks a Town’s Progress – New York Times

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New York Times
Officer's Journey to Gay Pride Honoree Marks a Town's Progress
New York Times
Barney Frank, the former congressman from Massachusetts, at Glen Rock's pride celebration this month. In a town like this, this is a major example of the progress we are making, he said. Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times. Officer Stanislao ...

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Officer's Journey to Gay Pride Honoree Marks a Town's Progress - New York Times

Introspective DeShone Kizer happy with offseason progress, ready to compete at training camp – ClevelandBrowns.com

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When the Browns drafted DeShone Kizer this past spring, they raved about his arm talent, prototypical size and willingness to learn.

But perhaps most of all, the former Notre Dame quarterback struck Cleveland with an unusual degree of self-awareness not commonly found in a 21-year-old.

One of the things that we found in talking with him was that he had really been self-reflective on some of the things that he wanted to improve upon, executive vice president of football operations Sashi Brown said in April, and hes already working on those things and has been through the offseason. Thats one of the things you want to see in a young quarterback.

That introspection was again on display Wednesday as Kizer spoke publicly for the last time before the Browns break for summer.

When the team returns in late July, hell have a chance to earn the starting quarterback job over veteran teammates Cody Kessler, Brock Osweiler and Kevin Hogan.

Im pretty happy with where I am right now, in the sense that this whole OTA experience and now veteran camp was just an opportunity for me to put myself in a position to potentially compete when it comes training camp time, he said. Once again, Im not in a position to even consider myself in that competition, but now after getting this base and getting the reps I have gotten in the last couple weeks, I think that by the time training camp comes aroundwith a little more work over this month offI'll be ready to compete with these guys and see what I can do.

Kizer, who passed for 5,809 yards and 47 touchdowns in two seasons with the Fighting Irish, took reps with the first-team offense on Day 1 of minicamp as coach Hue Jackson evaluates the roster from top to bottom.

Thats the way its been since OTAs have started. You guys just had an opportunity to see it, so I think the players will tell you nothing has changed, he said. We are just mixing and matching and giving guys opportunities. As I told you, Im going to find out about our guys. Thats what I have to do over these next couple of days before we go to training camp and as we get into training camp.

At his introductory news conference, Kizer spoke of wanting to start as fast as possible. Presented with those comments Wednesday, he shook his head and smiled.

That draft day comment was quickly taken back as soon as I figured out where I need to go, he said laughing. Theres so much that I have to learn. Im still in the same position I was last time we talked, and thats just trying to put myself in the position to compete one day.

I dont know if that day is nowit is up to (the coaching staff) on when they decide to start comparing us, he continued, but for me, its all about learning as much as you can and becoming as comfortable as you can, so that I can compete one day for that starting job.

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Introspective DeShone Kizer happy with offseason progress, ready to compete at training camp - ClevelandBrowns.com

Progress MS-06 launches; mission to remove Pirs module delayed – NASASpaceflight.com

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June 13, 2017 by Chris Gebhardt

Roscosmos has launched the Progress MS-06 resupply mission to the International Space Station. Liftoff occurred at 15:20:13 local time (05:20:13 EDT) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, 14 June 2017 with docking following on Friday. This mission was tomark the first time a major element of the ISS will be deorbited. However, the Pirs docking compartment removal has been delayed to next year.

Progress MS-06 launch preparations:

Given the launch campaigns of late for Roscosmos to the International Space Station, processing of the MS-06 Progress mission has been relatively uneventful and quite smooth.

In all, Progress MS-06 is the 158th Progress mission since the program began in 1978 for resupply efforts of the Salyut 6 space station and the 69th Progress mission to the ISS, counting the two Progress flights that were not designated as resupply missions because they delivered module elements to the Station.

One of those two Progress non-resupply flights occurred in 2001, when a modified Progress delivered the Pirs docking compartment to ISS.

Including this launch, 69 Progress missions have launched to ISS to date, with Progress MS-06 (or Progress 67 as it is known to NASA) the 66th attempt of a Progress family vehicle to successfully reach the Station, following the Progress 44 launch failure in August 2011, the Progress 59 launch mishap in April 2015, and the Progress 65 launch failure in December 2016.

Following retirement of the Soyuz-U carry a rocket in February, Progress MS-06 as a few previous Progress missions have utilized the Soyuz-2.1a rocket for lift off.

Following various construction milestones, system checkouts, and cargo loading, the Progress MS-06 vehicle was fueled with its propellants and compressed gases at the filling station at Baikonur on 31 May 2017.

After fueling operations were complete, technicians transferred the vehicle to the Spacecraft Assembly and Testing Facility (SC ATF), where was installed onto the assembly jig for final pre-launch processing.

In the SC ATF, engineers successfully mated Progress MS-06 to its support structure mount that will allow it to ride safely atop the third stage of the Soyuz 2.1a rocket.

Following the Designers Inspection, which clears the way for final launch processing, Progress was encapsulated into its payload fairing on 7 June.

On 9 June, engineers transported the encapsulated Progress to the Launch Vehicle Integration and Test Facility (LV ITF), where Progress was mated atop its Soyuz rocket.

The entire vehicle rolled out to launch pad 31/6 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan via rail transport on 11 June.

Progress MS-06 launched at 09:20:13 GMT (05:20:13 EDT 15:20:13 local time at Baikonur) on Wednesday, 14 June 2017.

After an 8 minute 45 second ascent, the Soyuz-2.1a rocket delivered Progress MS-06 into its initial orbit to begin a two-day, 34 orbit rendezvous with the ISS.

At the time of writing, NASASpaceflight.com has not been able to confirm why Progress MS-06 is conducting a two-day rendezvous instead of the fast track, four orbit docking profile used again since earlier this year after confirmation that the new ground communications tracking center at the Vostochny Cosmodrome was completed.

Most likely, however, the two-day rendezvous is part of an overall effect of crew compliment reduction on the ISS now that the number of people onboard Station has been reduced to three for the next two months.

MS-06 and the two-day ISS rendezvous:

Once Progress MS-06 is deposited into its initial orbit, the vehicle will perform primary health checks with the Vostochny Cosmodrome in eastern Russia before passing out over the Pacific.

If all is well aboard Progress, the vehicle will perform its first orbit raising maneuver, the DV1 burn, at 08:53:03 EDT (12:53:03 GMT) on 14 June.

The DV2 burn will follow shortly thereafter at 09:31:30 EDT (13:31:30 GMT).

The two burns will cumulatively change Progress MS-06s velocity by 62.03 m/s and raise and circularize Progress orbit to better match that of the International Space Stations.

A third burn, DV3, will follow on Thursday morning at 06:55:09 EDT (10:55:09 GMT) and will finalize Progress orbit via a delta-V shift of 4.00 m/s.

On Friday morning, docking operations will commence when the SCAN S-bd / C2V2 / HTV PROX / Cygnus PROX / Cygnus S-bd GS / Dragon S-bd GS rendezvous systems of the USOS (United States Operating Segment) are taken to inhibit to prevent any interference with Progress automated docking system and its communication with the RS (Russian Segment) of the ISS.

Inhibiting those systems will occur at 01:20 EDT (05:20 GMT) on 16 June while Progress MS-06 is 2,700 km from Station.

Progress will then initiate its automated docking sequence three hours later at 05:19:06 EDT (09:19:06 GMT), with the Impulse 1 burn of 15.147 m/s at 05:42:44 EDT.

Impulse 1 will change Progress trajectory to prepare the craft for proximity ops with ISS and to begin aligning it properly for the flyaround maneuver late in the approach timeline.

Further preparations on Station will continue with the handoff from the USOS Motion Control System (MCS) to the RS MCS at 05:54 EDT.

Impulse 2, delta-V: 1.575 m/s, from Progress will follow at 06:04:13 EDT (10:04:13 GMT).

The ISSs three person crew will then activate the Zvezda Service Modules (SMs) Kurs-P communication system at 06:07 EDT, followed by activation of the Kurs-NA system on Progress at 06:08 EDT.

Progress will then perform the Impulse 3 burn (delta-V: 25.01 m/s) at 06:27:11 EDT (10:27:11 GMT).

The SMs Kurs-P system will begin tracking Progress range from the ISS when the two craft are separated by 45 km which should occur at 06:37 EDT.

A final Kurs system communications check between the ISS and Progress MS-06 will follow at 06:50 EDT once Progress has closed to 15 km.

The SMs VHF-2 transmitter will be activated at 06:55:46 EDT for TORU (Teleoperated Mode of Control) command link when Progress is 9 km from ISS, with Progress VHF receiver turned on at 07:05:56 EDT for TORU command link at a range of 3 km from Station.

TORU is the backup, manual docking system that Fyodor Yurchikhin, Expedition 51 Commander, will use to dock Progress MS-06 to the Station should the crafts or Stations automated Kurs docking system fail.

Progress will then perform the Impulse 4 maneuver, imparting a delta-V shift of 5.396 m/s at 07:07:37 EDT (11:07:37 GMT).

TORU command link test between ISS and Progress will follow seconds later at 07:07:56 EDT.

The ballistic targeting point will be established at 07:09 EDT.

Impulse 5 is scheduled for 07:11:59 EDT, altering Progress speed by 5.633 m/s, followed by Impulse 6 (delta-V: 1.564 m/s) at 07:14:58 EDT.

Progress will then begin its flyaround maneuver of the ISS to align itself with the aft docking port of the Zvezda SM at 07:17:43 EDT (11:17:43 GMT).

The flyaround will end at 07:26:44 EDT, at which point Progress MS-06 will perform stationkeeping (maintaining relative position with Station) as the crew and Mission Control Moscow review all data points from MS-06 and verify its alignment with SMs aft docking port.

Under the pre-established timeline, Progress MS-06 will pulse its thrusters at 07:32:21 EDT (11:32:21 GMT) to begin the final 10 minute 9 second approach sequence.

Using its onboard computers, automated docking systems, and navigational aides, Progress MS-06 will guide itself to a planned docking at 07:42:30 EDT (11:42:30 GMT).

At the moment of docking, the RS of the Station will inhibit ISSs attitude control, placing the Station in free drift to help equalize dispersions between Progress and the ISS created by the energy of Progress contact with the docking mechanism.

Those dispersions should dissipate in time for all the hooks on Progress to drive into the ISS at 07:56 EDT creating a hard dock between the two craft.

The ISS will then be taken out of free drift and will reorient to its nominal attitude before the RS hands back motion control to the USOS at 08:35 EDT.

Eventual farewell to Pirs, preparing for the MLM Nauka lab:

While Progress MS-06 will dock to the International Space Station on the aft end of the Zvezda Service Module, the original plan was for the vehicle not spend all of its time at the ISS at that port.

Once Progress 2,398 kg (5,286 lb) of payload which consists of crew supplies, equipment and several satellites, two of which were built by schoolchildren hadbeen removed and the Stations disposal equipment packed inside, the ISS crew was to close and seal the hatches between Progress MS-06 and the Station and prepare it for undocking.

The original plan called for the vehicle to be undocked from the aft portion of this Zvezda Service Module and re-dock over the course of a couple of hours to the Progress docking port on the Pirs docking compartment.

However, this redock plan has been moved to a later flight, namely Progress MS-09 at the end of 2018.

The maneuverrelates to the plan to remove the Pirs module from ISS in order to make room for the MLM (Multipurpose Laboratory Module) Nauka for Russia, which has been heavily delayed the latest delay relating to a contamination concern.

Nauka Russias primary research lab for the Station requires the docking port Pirs is currently using.

Nauka is tentatively scheduled to launch in 2018 aboard a Proton-M rocket.

Pirs itself was delivered to ISS in 2001 via a modified Progress vehicle and is currently attached to the nadir port of Zvezda.

For its eventual removal, the now-future Progress will begin a process that no other spacecraft has yet performed the removal for destructive deorbit of a permanent module of the International Space Station.

At the end of its mission, the future Progress mission will pulse its thrusters, while keeping its docking clamps firmly latched onto Pirs, and will pull the docking compartment away from the International Space Station.

In this manner, Pirs itself will undock from the Station, with Progress acting more like a tugboat to safely maneuver the module away from the vicinity of the ISS.

Progress will then maneuver, with Pirs still attached, toward a destructive reentry into Earths atmosphere that will see the first major element of the International Space Station deorbited.

The reason Roscosmos has chosen to remove Pirs from the Station has nothing to do with the compartments overall life expectancy, usefulness, or performance.

It was entirely related to making room for the much-delayed MLM.

(Images: Roscosmos, NASA)

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Progress MS-06 launches; mission to remove Pirs module delayed - NASASpaceflight.com

Facebook researchers progress on teaching AI chatbots to negotiate – ZDNet

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Facebook researchers say they have made progress in training chatbots to negotiate.

The social networking giant's Facebook AI Research (FAIR) group published a paper to show how bots can be used to plan ahead in a conversation and adapt negotiation strategies.

Facebook's overall goal is to create chatbots that can reason, converse, and negotiate so its personal assistant can compete with rivals such as Google (Google Assistant), Amazon (Alexa), Apple (Siri) and Microsoft (Cortana) to name just a few.

How to Implement AI and Machine Learning

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In a blog post, Facebook noted that chatbots can hold short conversations and carry out simple tasks. But meaningful conversations is a challenge because the chatbot has to combine its knowledge of the world while understanding the conversation.

Facebook, which open sourced its code and published a paper, is hoping the research leads to better negotiations, intelligent compromises and novel sentences. Facebook, which in April rolled out a limited version of its bot, noted:

In order to train negotiation agents and conduct large-scale quantitative evaluations, the FAIR team crowdsourced a collection of negotiations between pairs of people. The individuals were shown a collection of objects and a value for each, and asked to agree how to divide the objects between them. The researchers then trained a recurrent neural network to negotiate by teaching it to imitate people's actions. At any point in a dialog, the model tries to guess what a human would say in that situation.

Unlike previous work on goal-orientated dialog, the models were trained "end to end" purely from the language and decisions that humans made, meaning that the approach can easily be adapted to other tasks.

Read also: MasterCard sees Facebook Messenger as a commerce, bot vehicle for Masterpass

Facebook's chatbot paper lands just as some analysts are questioning whether the company's AI efforts are actually making it into products. For instance, Edison Investment Research analyst Richard Windsor said in a research note that Facebook's digital assistant lacks AI in production. Windsor said:

Facebook M has been in beta for over 18 months and has comprised of a combination of automated responses and human interactions where the vast majority of the tasks have been carried out by humans. The problem with using humans of Digital Life services is that it is very expensive to scale the service for 2 billion users especially when the service will be funded by advertising. This why Facebook is working as quickly as it can to develop its in house expertise and while it remains a laggard in AI, it has shown some progress.

For example, at its developer conference, it showed some good progress on machine vision enabling its apps to recognize the world they can see through the smartphone camera. It also made Facebook M available to US users and most recently in Spanish to users in Mexico and US.

However, what has gone live is only a small part of the grand plans that were announced in 2015 which had an always on, all knowing bot with which the user could do almost anything.

In a nutshell, Facebook's research team is working toward that do-it-all bot, but it has some work to do.

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Facebook researchers progress on teaching AI chatbots to negotiate - ZDNet

Community House opening as ‘work in progress’ – Bloomington Pantagraph

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BLOOMINGTON Its been in development for six months, but the proposed Jefferson Street Community House will officially open Friday as a work in progress, said the director of resource development and community engagement for Mid Central Community Action.

A grand opening event for the joint project among the Bloomington Police Department, Community Action, and the West Bloomington Housing Collaborative is scheduled from 4 to 7 p.m. Friday, said Matthew Drat.

When we talk about it being a work in progress, we mean two things, he said. First, we still have to make the house ADA compliant. We have to finish the restroom and we will be installing a ramp. So, there is still work to be done. But more importantly, it is another step toward working with the neighborhood to improve the community as a whole and we think we have seen great strides in that during the last six months.

We are very happy that the house is open and it will serve and strengthen our community relations with people at a neighborhood level, said Bloomington Police Chief Brendan Heffner. We will be there to hear issues and concerns and to focus on crime prevention by speaking to neighbors on a regular basis so the neighborhood kids can see us in an everyday, human light.

Bloomington Mayor Tari Renner said the house will serve the purpose for which city officials intended.

This will prove to be an exciting project and asset to the west side, Renner said. I think it will do really great things to improve our relationship between our police and the neighborhood. Its a form of community policing and everybody gets to know everybody.

To help alleviate those concerns, the Jefferson Street Community House Advisory Council was formed. The group included a number of neighbors who provided input on the project.

We learned a great deal from that and much more than just what the house should be for the community, Drat said. We learned from neighbors about their needs for transportation and health care and the everyday problems they face. There are individuals who live and work in the community and they need to have their voice heard and so already, through this project, I think we have accomplished that and will continue to hear those voices as we go forward.

While several neighbors originally opposed the project, others said they think the mood has changed since the project was originally announced.

I think some people jumped to some conclusions and thought it was going to be different than what it turns out it is going to be, said Millie McMillian, who lives in the 600 block of West Jefferson. There were worries that the police were going to be jailing people there, but from what I hear, its just going to be a place for community events and neighbors to interact with police officers.

Fridays event is open to the public and will have games, youth activities and food, Drat said.

Follow Kevin Barlow on Twitter: @pg_barlow

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Community House opening as 'work in progress' - Bloomington Pantagraph

Trump’s Conflicts of Interest in Mexico – Center For American Progress

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Business deals gone wrong

In 2006, President Donald Trump and Los Angeles-based real-estate development company Irongate announced plans to develop a Trump-branded resort in northern Baja, Mexico, to be called Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico. Trump and the developers spent two years marketing the resort and selling units. In short order, more than 80 percent of the condo units were sold, collecting a total of $32.5 million in buyer deposits. However, the resort was never built, although the Trump Organization still reportedly collected $500,000 in licensing fees.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, every bit of [the deposits was] spent by the time Trump and his partners abandoned the project in early 2009 as the global economy was reeling. As a result, many of the condo buyers sued Trump and his partners for fraud, with most of them accusing Trump and two of his adult children, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., of duping them into believing that Trump was one of the developers, giving them the confidence that it was safe to buy unbuilt property in Mexico, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The Trumps have denied any wrongdoing, and in 2013, they settled the fraud lawsuit against them, the terms of which are confidential. Trump Organization Chief Legal Officer Alan Garten called claims that buyers were deceived Categorically untrue. For their part of the fraud suit, the developers agreed to pay condo buyers at least $7.25 million and likewise admitted no wrongdoing.

Related to this failed resort, in October 2016, a Mexican government official and former congressman, Jaime Martnez Veloz, filed a criminal tax fraud complaint with the Mexican federal government against Trump and the Baja resort developers. The complaint alleges that Trump and his partners avoided paying Mexican taxes on their $32.5 million predevelopment sales revenue.

In January 2017, on the same day President Trump signed an order to speed up the U.S.-Mexico border wall construction, Reuters reported that Martnez broadened the complaint to include allegations that Trump violated Mexican law by, as a foreigner, seeking to buy property within 31 miles (50 km) of the U.S. border to develop the Trump Ocean Resort Baja project and to question whether Trump was issued a visa in relation with the project, in compliance with Mexican immigration laws. Mexicos attorney generals office confirmed that it was investigating the complaint, and neither the Trump Organization nor the White House responded to Reuters requests for comment.

In another deal, this one in 2007, Trump signed an agreement with Mexican businessmen Pedro Rodriguez and Rodolfo Rosas Moya to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Mexico. The business arrangement was worth millions of dollars, but Trump claimed that he was not fully paid according to the agreement, believing he was owed $12 million. Trump reportedly sued Rosas Moya and won but was unable to recoup the lost cash, which has been a source of considerable anger for him.

In 2015, in a series of tweets, Trump noted, The Mexican legal system is corrupt, as is much of Mexico. Pay me the money that is owed me nowand stop sending criminals over our border. In addition, Trump called on people: Dont do business with Mexico! As reported by the Daily Beast, [Trump] seemed to connect his own legal problems with his desire to build a giant barrier between the United States and Mexico, writing Mexicos court system corrupt. I want nothing to do with Mexico other than to build an impenetrable WALL and stop them from ripping off U.S.

This interactive map of the world spells out President Donald Trumps and his familys conflicts of interest in 25 countries around the globe.

In February 2016, on the same day that Trump gave a speech at a campaign rally in South Carolina in which he excoriated Mexico for the loss of American jobs and businesses, a law firm in Mexico City filed trademark applications on behalf of the Trump Organization. In October 2016, the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property approved one of the trademarks, and about a month after Trumps inauguration, it approved three more trademarks. According to reporting by the Associated Press, The Mexican trademarks cover a broad range of business operations that can roughly be broken down into construction; construction materials; hotels, hospitality and tourism; and real estate, financial services and insurance. They are all valid through 2026.

Trump previously held the same four trademarks, but those expired in 2015, and in total, Trump has at least 20 trademarks in Mexico. In speaking with the Associated Press about the trademarks, Trump Organization chief counsel Alan Garten said that the Trump Organization was not being granted anything we didnt have before, as the original trademarks came years before [Trump] even announced his candidacy. Garten went on to say that the trademarks, which were originally intended to pave the way for business in the country and to prevent others from trademarking the name and using it for their own gain, are now purely for the latter defensive purpose.

According to both Trumps July 2015 and May 2016 financial disclosure formsneither of which were verified by regulators and therefore may not include all of his foreign deals or assetsTrump owned, had ownership interest in, or was a managing member of several companies related to business in Mexico, including the following:

Mexico demonstrates that, again, because of Trumps many conflicts, his foreign policy views and positions continue to be influenced by his business interests. President Trump seems to want to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico at least in part because he believes that he is owed money. The fact that such a wall would be wildly impractical, cost tens of billions of dollars, and potentially spark a trade war that could cause the loss of thousands of American jobs doesnt seem to register with him even as an afterthought.

Carolyn Kenney is a policy analyst on the National Security and International Policy team at the Center for American Progress. John Norris is a senior fellow at the Center.

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Trump's Conflicts of Interest in Mexico - Center For American Progress

E3 2017: State Of Decay 2 Features A More Open And Diverse … – GameSpot

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Shown off during the Microsoft E3 Press Conference, Undead Labs revealed new footage of the follow up to its original 2013 release State of Decay. In the sequel, State of Decay 2, players will find themselves in the shoes of a randomly generated survivor and must navigate the landscape of the zombie apocalypse while engaging with the undead, coordinating with survivors, and making hard choices in order to survive and live another day.

During a special behind-closed-doors session with the game, founder of Undead Labs, Jeff Strain, gave us a detailed look at State of Decay 2, and how his team is bringing the number one requested feature from fans, online co-op, into the game, which will dramatically alter the fundamentals and coordination with survivors. Set 15 months after the events of the first game, the world hasn't gotten much better, and things will soon become even more complicated.

At the beginning of the game, players will pick their character from an assortment of randomly created individuals. Much like the last game, characters have unique skills and traits that they're best at, and in State of Decay 2, they made the characters far more diverse. For instance, the skills system from the last game has been greatly expanded, offering more options and avenues for role-playing. Players good at scavenging will have a better time finding useful materials in the field, and in addition to new skills, players can upgrade these abilities to acquire brand new perks which significantly expand their more useful skills.

For the most part, the general gameplay loop of State of Decay 2 remains similar to the original game. Players must fortify a stronghold, find new survivors to help with expanding and strengthening their home--which includes growing food, gearing up, and having security to guard against random zombie attacks--and also going out on missions to find supplies, new survivors, and new strongholds to expand the network of safe spaces around the world. Speaking of which, the game space is now three times bigger than the previous game, which will certainly make traversal and exploration a larger focus for SOD2.

During the presentation, our group of survivors traveled to an abandoned police station to acquire weapons. Inside, zombies were present. One of the players used a machete and his enhanced melee skills to make quick work of the undead, while another player--through co-op play--took all the supplies and loaded them up into the trunk of the car, which is also a new feature in State of Decay 2. While driving back, they came to find their base overrun by the undead and had to quickly use their new weapons to fight off the horde. During this fight, new zombie types quickly made an appearance. The Juggernaut, which was shown in the trailer, took out the entire group, but not before killing off some of the survivors.

The original title did a solid job of portraying an open, explorable setting in the middle of the zombie apocalypse, and State of Decay 2 is looking to keep that going here. I was impressed with how much of the core gameplay focused on resource management and base building was expanded, while retaining the focus on simple survivalism in the middle of the zombie plague. The online co-op--online only, no local play--should be a game changer for this title, especially when factoring in the tough choices and important decisions that have to be made when it comes to keeping your head above water.

With its release coming Spring 2018, this open-world zombie survival game is shaping up to be a more refined and developed take on a surprise hit that showed just how nerve-wracking and stressful it is to survive in a world full of zombies.

For more information on State of Decay 2, and other titles at E3 2017, check out our E3 hub for more updates on all the latest happening at the show.

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E3 2017: State Of Decay 2 Features A More Open And Diverse ... - GameSpot

Here’s Everything Microsoft Just Announced at the Xbox E3 Show – TIME

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Bathed in electric green lights, enthralled by the staccato thump of shock-and-awe music, attendees at The Galen Center listened Sunday to Microsoft executives pitch the next phase in the Xbox's journeyfrom what in 2013 began as a controversial motion-controlled, next-gen media hub, to today's rededication as a gaming-foremost, super-powered 4K graphical monster.

Meet Xbox One X, the official name for Microsoft's souped up Xbox One, formerly codenamed "Project Scorpio." It boasts 6 teraflops of GPU compute power, 12 gigabytes of DDR5 memory, and games capable of running at native 4K resolutions, which is all just to say that it's going to be a pixel-crunching beast.

"There is no power greater than X," said Xbox honcho Phil Spencer. "It's the most powerful console ever made."

And yes, also rather pricey: $499, or $100 more than Sony's own 4K-angled box, the PlayStation 4 Pro, which debuted last November. But if the battle in the 4K graphics space is currently about chasing enthusiast wallets, Microsoft is positioning Xbox One X as a box that justifies the extra outlay with raw specs capable of delivering much more than Sony's product to videophiles and 4K connoisseurs. If the narrative around the Xbox One and PlayStation 4's debut in 2013 centered on the PlayStation 4's superior specs, today's show was Microsoft taking the ball back.

Xbox One X will also make existing Xbox One games look better and load faster, uses a liquid-cooled vapor chamber to tame its doubtless nutty thermals (a first for a console) and still somehow winds up being the smallest Xbox console the company's made, including the Xbox One S. The Xbox One X will be available on November 7, worldwide.

How to show off all that power? With the world premiere of Forza Motorsport 7 , a supercar extravaganza for Xbox One and Windows 10 that takes all the things we've come to expect from high-end racersgorgeous cloudscapes, crisp terrain, dynamic weather like thunderheads rolling in and water beading on windshieldsand kicks it up a whole lot more than a notch.

Players can rip through 30 "famous" areas with dynamic race conditions and collect more than 700 cars, including the 2018 Porsche 911 GTS RS. The game runs at native 4K and 60 frames per second on Xbox One X, and ships for Xbox One and Windows 10 on October 3. (The Xbox One X version will be available when that console ships on November 7.)

Though not console-exclusive, Ubisoft's long-awaited return to the Assassin's Creed-verse looked pretty slick during the show's world premiere gameplay demo. As rumored, the game will take place in ancient Egypt. It involves the story of a sort of Egyptian sheriff attempting to protect his community, a struggle out of which the company says will emerge the tale of the birth of the brotherhood of assassins.

Climb pyramids, fight in coliseums, gallop through dusty palm-treed lands, command birds to surveil and track enemies, fire weapons in slow-motion while mid-leap and engage an enormous open world that's been fine-tuned to resemble more a roleplaying than traditional action-adventure game. It's available October 27.

The promise of a master version of studio Mojang's sandbox builder, identical across all platforms, not just functionally but at the codebase level, is finally happening . With what Microsoft calls the "Better Together Update," the Nintendo Switch and Xbox One versions of Minecraft will converge with the Windows 10, Virtual Reality and mobile versions. All will hence run the C++ version, or what creator Mojang and Microsoft have taken to calling the "bedrock engine."

What's more, Microsoft teased something it's calling the "Super Duper Graphics Pack," a graphical update coming this fall that will include overhauled textures and lighting (including support for high dynamic range) for what amounts to an official vamp on the kinds of user mods that have made such things possible in the Java PC version for years.

Today's "best opener of the show" award goes to Terry Crews as Commander Jaxon. Brash and bombastic, the Crackdown 3 sizzle reel was too confusing to make much sense of. But this four-player campaign cooperative sandbox smack-around will be central to the Xbox One X's launch lineup when it arrives on November 7.

BioWare's new "shared world" action roleplaying game, Anthem , has players (dubbed "freelancers") exploring a massive open world while donning exosuits dubbed "Javelins," differentiated by their abilities. In the demo, a player flew Superman-style through a lush jungle, encountering dynamic enemies, diving underwater and boosting around, then reemerging to tango with further indigenous hostiles. The game, which appears to blend elements of Destiny and Titanfall , supports up to four people playing together in squadrons. Look for it fall 2018.

The press conference included a barrage of world premieres, including a mix of both platform and launch (meaning temporarily) exclusives. We learned of Metro: Exodus 's existence, another post-apocalyptic open-world shooter from series developer 4A Games that's coming in 2018, and Life is Strange: Before the Storm, a three-part adventure that takes place before the BAFTA-winning original. Online tactical survival romp PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, released in March for PCs, is coming to Xbox One. Deep Rock Galactic, a co-op first-person shooter with procedurally generated levels starring "badass space dwarves," looked like Overwatch meets Minecraft (launch exclusive).

There was State of Decay 2 , another zombie invasion survival game (exclusive to Xbox One and Windows 10), and The Darwin Project , an arena-style survivalism game (launch exclusive). The Last Night 's lovely animated 2D cyberpunk vistas was evocative of Flashback (launch exclusive). Rare offered another look at Sea of Thieves , its shared-world pirate plunderer (Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive). There's a new "Ori" game in the works, dubbed Ori and the Will of the Wisps , that's exclusive to Windows 10 and Xbox One. And Cuphead, Studio MDHR's long-awaited retro-cartoon-side-scroller that's exclusive to Xbox One and Windows, is finally going to be playable September 29.

I'm missing a bunch of others here, like Super Lucky's Tale, The Artful Escape of Francis Vendetti, CodeVein and Ashen , but then it was a show designed in part to impress by deluging.

Microsoft's claims about the popularity of backward compatibility are a bit vague, but it's hard to imagine the company wasting time and money getting nearly 400 Xbox 360 games to work with the Xbox One without a solid business case. And it's even harder to imagine today's revelation--that original Xbox games are in the offing (they'll look and play better, said Microsoft)--if the economics, to say nothing of the goodwill this sort of move engenders among fans, weren't solid enough.

All this said, the presser's montage of verdant other-worlds and collapsed civilizations felt a bit skewed toward brutality and bleakness. Microsoft's view of gaming circa 2017 clearly privileges platform exclusivity and visual muscularity, but also games whose central tenets involve smacking things around and general dollops of thematic sound and furiousness. For Xbox, gaming's future looks like much of its past, wherein players thrash, shoot and brutally skewer stuff. Some of this is doubtless the marketing need to cast Xbox One X in its most rambunctious light, but there was a sense of conceptual blur about the roundup that I worry fuels the (deeply mistaken) narrative that games are just boisterous toys for power fantasists.

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Here's Everything Microsoft Just Announced at the Xbox E3 Show - TIME

The book Christians should read instead of ‘The Benedict Option’ – America Magazine

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American Christianity today is beset by political gloom. This gloominess is certainly evident in this years best seller on faith and politics: Rod Drehers The Benedict Option, which David Brooks hails as the most important religious book of the decade.

Inspired by the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, Dreher argues that the modern West is living under [the] barbarism of moral permissiveness, secularism and individualism. In this new Dark Age, public morality is all about individualistic relativism and moral choices are nothing more than expressions of what the choosing individual feels is right. Gone are the traditional virtue communities of yesteryear. Faith is in decline. In its place barbarians with designer suits and smart phones dominate democracies in the name of a hostile secular nihilism.

Dreher believes that Christians have been slow to recognize this fait accompli. What it demands of them is forming local communities of committed believers who preserve virtue for a future flowering of civilization. Failure to do so will doom our children and our childrens children to assimilation.

Given Drehers alarming call to do battle in the modern world, Julin Carrns new book, Disarming Beauty, which asks Christians to lay down their arms and enter the public square with joy and confidence, may seem wildly nave. Yet Carrns argument deserves careful consideration by Christians attracted to the Benedict Option.

Carrn is a Catholic theologian, priest and leader of the movement Communion and Liberation (in which, full disclosure, I participate). Carrn shares similar anxieties about the modern spiritual crisis of nihilism (anxieties that I, incidentally, think are overblown). But, in sharp contrast to Dreher, Carrn does not think Christians should disown contemporary society as a new Dark Age.

This is because todays secular democracies were partly built by Christians (in collaboration with others) and reflect a deep affirmation of their faith. Indeed, Carrn notes, the church in the first centuries was founded on the revolutionary distinction between the two cities, between God and Caesar. Similarly, a secular society maintains a clear and crucial distinction between the church and stately power. A genuinely open, secular public space is thus not a disadvantage to Christianity but rather an assurance against the perennial temptation to use power instead of love to spread faithwhat Carrn calls the temptation of hegemony. This temptation, as Carrn relates, is, unfortunately, something to which Christians frequently succumb. Thus, despite real tensions and disagreements, there remains a profound harmony between Christianity and [the] Enlightenment.

Secularism is not the enemy of Christianity but a historic opportunity for the church to live its witness authentically and unarmed. But Carrn also makes clear that the individual freedom defended by secular democracies is not simply an inconvenience necessary for avoiding the temptation of hegemony. Rather, from the Christian perspective, freedom is the most precious gift heaven gave to humanity. Indeed, there is no real faith without freedom to reject that faith.

When scandalized by others freedom, Carrn insists that Christians should return to the model of Jesus who never forced or coerced conversion. Instead, Jesus always began from the heart or desires of the individual in front of him.

For this reason, Carrn stresses Jesus famous parable of the prodigal son whose father gives him his inheritance early so he may fully pursue his freedom and desires even to the point of complete moral dissipation. Why does the father not intervene by the use of force? Why is he not scandalized by the muck of his sons desires?

Central to the Christian claim is that every human heart has a desire for the infinite, such that every other desire remains restlessly unsatisfied until a relationship with God is formed. Jesus recognized that real faith must always pass through the free desire of the human heart. Instead of coercion, Jesus approach was to offer people a bigger, more engaging love.

Carrn insists that this is why the earliest Christians did not focus on saving civilization but instead desired intensely to mix with Jew or Greek, to present to everyone a truly desirable humanity. This means that Christians, above all people, should affirm individual freedomallowing others to test out their desires and see if anything else will satisfy them. Indeed, Christians should even love this journey, this dramatic destiny of all Gods prodigal sons, who demand their inheritances and test their desires.

By contrast, Drehers book is filled with a deep ambivalence about individual freedom. Although he insists that Christians need the freedoms of the modern state to carry out their Benedict Options, he at the same time wants to denounce this state for its inadequate goal of facilitating and expanding human choice. Drehers project both denounces and requires the secular spaces of freedom he so distrusts.

This is very different from Carrns insistence that Christians should embrace the drama of freedom. According to Carrn, it is clear that returning to a society based on Christian laws is against the very nature of Christianity. Instead, Christians should seek to affirm and revitalize a space of freedom in which nothing is imposed by anyone and a society forms in which each person can freely contribute to its construction, offering his own witness.

It is difficult to imagine a position more diametrically opposed to Drehers belief that following your own heart, no matter what society says, or the church...is devastating to every kind of social stability. Thus, although Dreher at one point hints that Carrns Communion and Liberation is possibly in the spirit of the Benedict Option, he is clearly wrong.

Ultimately, Carrn believes Christians should come to the modern space of freedom armed with nothing but the beauty and attractiveness of their lives. The authentic Christian is not afraid of having to live in todays cultural pluralism without special legal privileges.

In spaces of individual freedom, Christians do not evangelize by withdrawing but by forming friendships. In chapter after chapter, Carrn insists that Christianity did not begin with a moral system or assent to dogmatic claims but with Jesus, who offered his companionship. Faith, in other words, begins as a relationshipas a willingness to fall in love with and accompany others. Far from embattled retraction, Christians today should see their politics as one of friendship: of being able to embrace and stay with the Other. And not because the Other is a burdensome duty but because the Other is a good.

Once again the model is Christ. Carrn recounts how in the Gospels the Pharisees thought Zacchaeus needed moral correction. But Jesus instead puts his trust in a real relationship. To the great chagrin and scandal of the Pharisees, Jesus asks to eat at Zacchaeuss house. In other words, Jesus sees Zacchaeus with all his imperfections and confusions and still loves him.

Carrn believes the great danger for Christians today lies in reducing their faith to a new Pelagianism, or the erroneous doctrine that the faithful save themselves through their efforts. In this light, Drehers call for civilizational action and virtuous withdrawal does not place sufficient trust in the essence of Christianitynamely, relationships with others.

Over and over again, Carrn seems to ask: If Christianity is true, what do Christians really have to fear?

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The book Christians should read instead of 'The Benedict Option' - America Magazine

Searching for the Last Sincere Festival Experience at Download 2017 – Noisey

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Guys: I'm done with irony in music. I can't cope with it anymore. We're past the point of no return. Earlier on, I scrolled through my colleague Lauren's article arguing Darius' "Baby One More Time" Popstars audition as a cultural a priori for Ed Sheeran's cover of the same Britney hit, and I didn't even bat an eyelid. Worse than that, during the Manchester tribute concert the other night, my mom texted me saying how she couldn't stand Chris Martin and, without thinking, I texted back arguing his artistic integrity and pushing of the boundaries. I've become a slave.

But it isn't just me: it's all of you. I have absolutely no idea whether any of you mean anything you say. Yes, we've flown too close to the sun of nihilism, and now we're all drowning in a sea of our own jizz. Even the ritualistic, animalistic festivals where we spent our teens learning to lower our boundaries and celebrate music aren't safe anymore. On Saturday daytime at Glastonbury last year, I thought I'd skulk over to Will Young, a million miles away from everything else on a tiny stage: there were queues. Queues. I just want to feel things; I just want an honest, wholesome musical experience; something that stands for something. I want I want Download.

If anything can provide me with the sincere, surely it is the UK's premier heavy rock and metal festival? Aerosmith, Slayer, System of a Down, in the East Midlands. So for the first time I embark on a pilgrimage in search of a people who are doing something not for a laugh, but because they enjoy it. Those with their ears to the ground; those partaking in the last earnest music festival experience.

And, strolling through the entrances, it is stunning. Parents are led by children in Slipknot masks, trying out their throaty singing voices, sounding like Gizmo. Triplets of actual people in actual Biffy Clyro shirts pass eating cones of curly fries; the paths, clear, the hordes instead glued to stages. Dear God: utopia.

I take a whiff of the Donington air.

I can smell what the Dutch call "gezellig," said to be untranslatable in the English language. So I'll try it with senses: nutmeg bringing Christmas home early; the distant sound of A Day To Remember; the carefree feeling of mud splashing on a pair of 5 jorts.

After popping up my tent and rounding the site out for half an hour, I find backstage. Backstage at other festivals is home to free coffee; an empty fridge; people crowded asking for the wi-fi password, furiously trying to update their Instagram with photos of 90s soap opera stars with in-jokes as hashtags. Here, it is 30-year-old men dressed like Paddington Bear in eyeliner. By the door stands a to-scale statue of Slash so that people can compare their proportionate size next to him. Sort of like they're the human in those dinosaur books we had when we were younger.

But this isn't about chugging Jgermeister with the gods; this is about the people.

I mean, they look real. Like you would look if you'd been drinking Hobgoblin and sleeping in tents for two nights. Coachella's endless parade of husks with perfectly coiffed fades and highlighter this is absolutely not, which gets me thinking: are there any drugs at Download? Are drugs wholesome? Did they have E in the Garden of Eden?

"This little fella," says a man at security, with a voice as gravely as Lou Ferrigno, "Is an AEDD."

"Sorry, so what's that?" I ask.

"It's an Arms and Explosive Detection Dog." The AEDD wags its tail at the word 'dog.' "Yeah, which, due to the climate, is the only type of dog we have on site. We have 18 of these guys," the security guy says.

"Wait, so you don't have any drug dogs on site?"

"Not one." I'm gobsmacked, and he can tell. Laughing, he continues, "Listen, it's just not really a drug festival. You may get a little bit of weed here and there, but nobody is bringing anything heavy in here."

"Of course," I say, nodding. "Apart from the metal." I stare at the ground. I think we're done here.

Walking around, I see an endangered species.

T-shirts, with words. Those most beautiful things, baring a simple message that the wearer truly believes in. A creed that has been brought to near extinction through appropriation from the world of irony, thriving in their natural habitat. Like Attenborough with the mountain gorillas, I go to meet them.

"Hey dude!" He turns around to me. "What are your thoughts on the festival so far?" I ask. He looks down at the ground and says:

"Spot on, pal. Really enjoyed myself and can't wait for Biffy later."

Neither hatred nor laughter? This shirt is a lie! Or maybe Maybe this is an ironic shirt? Has he made an ironic bear trap to split my ankle into two? Surely not. No, I must be misunderstanding it.

I have to go deeper; I have to become more Download. So I head to the festival's thriving markets. The kind of place I haven't visited since I was a teen. People from Birmingham have something similar in the Oasis Market; those from Cardiff will remember Blue Banana.

A walking noir tat market. A home away from home.

The first thing I see is something that could really help me drink from the fountain of Download.

"Excuse me," I call the lady. "Can I drink out of these?"

"Of course!" She excitedly runs over. "It's all safe. Properly made from cows, there's a bit of leather here so that you can attach them to yourself." My heart sinks.

"Oh I don't wear leather; I'm a vegetarian." She recoils, and smiles.

"If you're ethically opposed to leather, I can't see you thriving in this community!"

How dare she? I huff, and sprint to the first faux leather item I can find. 6? Sold.

I pick up my boot, and scream to the skies, partaking in a Download ritual as standing by the toilets and crying for Cthulhu.

But something just isn't quite right. I'm just not getting it.

Defeated, I queue up for a beer, feeling sorry for myself. What use is it? Then, all of a sudden, a miasma arises around me: a thick, sour aroma. A craft ale smell. Yes! Of course. A world away from cocaine shits; we're in the land of pickle parps. It's Wychwood Brewery beer - loads of it - a hint of pork bap, drenched in sharp, tart apple sauce. Quite simply, it's the most wholesome fart I've ever smelled. I turn, excited, to see the host behind this fleshy deposit.

"Hey brother," he says. I can't speak. The living embodiment of everything Download, right in front of me. Right up my nostrils. He's not concerned about anything going on around him; he's living in the moment, being who he wants to be. Letting us all know exactly who he is on the inside. He's woken up, thought: 'You know who is fucking cool? The wrestler Goldust. And I'm going to get my face painted like him, because that's who I admire.' It's a pure, beautiful thing. Think about being a child: we didn't need a bag of ket or a trip to Budapest to escape we put on a cape. And that's what this place is all about.

And you know who I want to be today?

Make me Perfect.

I feel his raw power coursing through my veins. Finally, I understand what it is.

Everything has clicked. I'm not sure why, but I feel comfortable now; I no longer look like a person who has spent ten minutes Googling "Berlin fashion" on a bus. The makeup has disarmed me; taken me off heat. From within this disguise, I can really appreciate what makes Download great.

Police officers can actually get their faces painted, without worrying about people fucking with them here.

Girlfriends attend on favour, humouring their 34-year-old boyfriend's worrying new wrestling interest warmly and whole-heartedly.

People headbang at the wheel of bumper cars to Bohemian Rhapsody; one of the festival's curated Fairground playlist.

It's Download.

Time passes. The dads have long gone to bed; their children probably lay in their sleeping bags on an iPad. That leaves me, 26-year-old man, running amok with 19-year-olds from Leeds and alpha-male Scots.

A guy runs up to me and shouts, 'Goldust!' tackling me to the floor.

And with that thud; I'm winded. It doesn't feel wholesome. It hurts. All of a sudden, something doesn't feel right. It's no wonder that the dad's have disappeared, as night time has brought about a strange creed. It's essentially culminated with an earthquake gathering at the last late stage. The epicentre being lots of men stood still, intensely watching scantily clad women dancing to System of a Down like it's a game of tennis.

For fucking hours.

The night spirals on. Out of control.

As much as I love the same ten Linkin Park, Slipknot and Papa Roach songs being replayed, I decide to head to bed.

I awake, mouth dry; head spinning. I clamber across the campsite; Chris Jericho's band blares from across the valley on the main stage. I head to the toilet, and turn into the mirror: I see my reflection. I catch the remains of a wrestler's tattered makeup on my face.

I chuckle. The coffee cup drops.

Dear God: this was all a gag, wasn't it? Download wasn't the problem it was me. I had brought nothing but irony with me. And like the moment Eve and Adam betrayed God by bringing sin into the Garden of Eden for that reason, I must be banished.

There is an earnest paradise out there; one in which people say the things they mean, and actually enjoy things. But if you even remotely find this next picture funny. Even a smile; you can't be part of it.

Hello, cruel world.

#EndIronyNow #CansForSincerity #WeAreTheEnemy

Follow Oobah on Twitter.

Photography by Chris Bethell.

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Searching for the Last Sincere Festival Experience at Download 2017 - Noisey

Poetry? What for? | The American Conservative – The American Conservative

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A decline in English majors at universities demonstrates that the field is losing popularity amongst students. This decline might be the result of a perceived impracticality of literature, but it should be considered whether its the field itself that is erring. An example that illustrates how the teaching of literature is failing short comes from one of its most important constituents poetry.

Poetry is a paradox. It is the most complex and inimitable expression of thought and consciousness, but it is also the most natural and ancient. Although a form of oral and written tradition that has persisted throughout the years, poetry is dismissed as unnecessary and impractical in literary education. The problem with teaching poetry is not that the language is too difficult; it is that the questions that poetry explores are no longer considered valid. Literary critic Harold Bloom described poetry as the crown of literature because it is a prophetic mode. To be prophetic, however, poetry needs to contain a wise understanding of truths about man in order to provide a glimpse into the future. Perhaps a decline in the popularity of poetry in classrooms is related to an increasing rejection of universal truths as a guiding principle for undertaking studies in literature.

Whenever an English teacher or student is asked to defend the value of their (seemingly) leisurely field, the argument tends to turn into a defense of literature as a way to teach effective communication. Effect, however, is synonymous with persuasion rather than formation. Literature, then, is a means for a tactic acquired rather than an exercise of thought and inquiry, and all that poetry is within the field of literature is merely complicated and flowery language for what could otherwise be stated directly. Instead of teaching students that, through poetry, they can inquire about the world and their place in it, they are taught that through poetry they can convince others about their individualized truths and feelings. These feelings become the authority in a classroom that denies objective truth and universal human experience as a product of poetry.

In 1833, John Stuart Mill stated that the object of poetry is to act upon the emotions, which is what distinguishes it from fact and science. While math and science does its work by convincing or persuading, poetry does so by moving. But students are no longer being moved by poetry because its aim in classrooms seems to be more in line with Mills understanding of science. In other words, poetry no longer moves the soul, it persuades the mind. The postmodern rendering of literary analysis has made poetry a practice in understanding subjectivity, and now poetry is dismissed because we no longer view it as a serious mode of study: we use it either as a test for our level of literary comprehension, or as a medium for our own exaltation. Yet the inquiring nature of poetry geared towards understanding life is what results in the moving of our soul because it is what allows us to connect with a strangers sentiments on a personal level. Poetry acts upon our emotions, but it achieves this in no small part by searching for a truth and understanding that we all share that truth.

Still, Mill was right to mark the distinction between poetry and science. Poetry is a form of inquiry and corroboration for what we call true beyond what can be scientifically proven. But much like math and science, good inquiry ought to lead us to gaze outwards, not inwards. While we do not use poetry to question the chemical composition of a flower and the seasonal changes that affect its growth and withering, we do use it to contemplate beauty and death. To say that there are universal truths to humans is to say that forms of art and self-expression are ultimately attempts at discovering and understanding what we cannot unveil through epistemological means. By believing that there is a right and a real that we can discern, forms of art such as poetry become a universal language to relate commonalities in our experiences. But when right and real are rendered subjective, so is poetry. Poetry, then, loses its legitimacy as a form of philosophical inquiry about the soul to which all of us can relate, and instead becomes an amateur form of life sharing to which only some of us can relate.

Now that truth has been declared a myth in education, the methods for teaching the liberal artsof which poetry is a parthave naturally been pulled towards two ends: either a scientific method form of explanation of human phenomena, or an inane outpouring of sentiments to express how we feel regardless of facts or reality. Neither of these ends, however, makes for a proper reading and creation of poetry. The rationalist, who thinks that we can know everything through reason alone, and therefore do not need tradition, invalidates art as a serious form of inquisition for knowledge about the world. The post-modern absurdist, who thinks there is nothing that can be known universally, renders poetry and art at large into a subjective form of expression where anything goes and nothing is true because its contents are swayed by irrevocable culture, class, race, and gender politics.

Needless to say, literature has moved more towards the postmodern end, which is why it is being taken less and less seriously as a field of study. If or when poetry is taught for emotional effect, it is taught in a form that makes the reading and writing of poetry seem like a sentimental exercise, the academic equivalent of a visit to a therapist for which you didnt sign up: A poem is displayed on paper as one would place a strange lab animal on a tray, ready to be dissected with a knife until it is broken up and broken down into analyzed, rationalized bits and pieces about the author and his intention for writing the poem rather than what the work is actually saying. At least Derrida gave the process an honest name.

It cannot be overstated that the use of poetry is collective, not individualist, which is why its use is vital for the preservation and understanding of our human history. Neither poetry nor its readers are apt to tear down the towers that humans have been building from a foundation of literary tradition as old as our very existence. If taught as a form of inquiry, poetry inculcates the importance of humility and tradition in knowledge: its verses invoke nature, mythology, history, literature, and other important facets of our human experience because we cannot know anything alone. We rely on our past to form an understanding of who we are, so although poetry is an individual practice, it becomes part of a communal form of inquiry directed towards discovering universal truths. Reading poetry can add another level to our tower of what has been said before. Poetry, then, should not be used against itself to throw spears at what weve built as a collective understanding, fortified throughout ages, of what it means to be human.

We are teaching poetry upside down by making students break down poems before they can appreciate them and grow with them. As a result, students become critics for a realm they have not yet explored to its fullest, because they have not yet lived long enough to do so. The use of poetry in a classroom should be neither overly practical nor overly sentimental. As poetry is a form of expression that is inquisitive and formative, it ought to be used for that very purpose: to form the minds of people who will likely ponder about the same things that people before them did. An appreciation for poetry is foundand it really requires seeking and effortin the space between the rationalism and postmodernism that is prevalent in our lives. If we continue to teach poetry from a utilitarian angle geared towards persuasion and analysis of our own subjectivity rather than as an inquisition for truth, it will lose its true effect as a medium that inspires us to look beyond ourselveswhat poet Dana Gioia accurately called poetry as enchantment.

Poetry appreciation is a nobler task than poetry analysis of criticism, and it is a seed that can be planted in our early years of education. Successful teaching of poetry where students walk away having their interests piqued and with a sense of inquiry about the nature of being is possible insofar as they understand that through reading someone else, they are reading themselves; through reading about another time, they are reading about their time. Students will only find a purpose in poetry if poetry is directed towards a sense of truth about existence that outweighs other forms of subjectivity. A proper teaching of poetry will motivate students to read and re-read poetry, since reading poetry over and over allows us to get something new every time: Truth reveals itself gradually through experience, after all. When we learn to read a poem for the questions that it raises and its effort at seeking a form of truth about the obscurities of life, we gain the virtue of patience to learn about the world and ourselves.

Nayeli Riano is a freelance writer, poet, and essayist from New Jersey. Her work has been featured on National Review Online and the blogs of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).

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Poetry? What for? | The American Conservative - The American Conservative

"The Ornithologist," a groin-first film about Saint Anthony, at the Parkway this week – Baltimore City Paper

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Nearly half a century after gay Marxist atheist Pier Paolo Pasolini shocked Italy by delivering a version of St. Matthew's Gospel that played the story relatively straight, director Joao Pedro Rodrigues offers a film about another saint, this time Anthony, though it's more in line with Derek Jarman's radically queer film about Saint Sebastian. Rodrigues takes key elements of Anthony's storyhe was born Fernando; he was shipwrecked on the way back from a mission; he held Jesus when he was an infant; "he had brought a young man back to life with a single magic breath"; and he had a "fascination with nature and animals"and irreverently reconfigures all of them into an erotic misadventure in which our hero is filled with the spirit groin-first.

Fernando (Paul Hamy), the titular ornithologist, is searching for black storks on a river when rapids send his kayak into some rocks around a nearby forest. Two Catholic pilgrims from China rescue him, but after he expresses doubts about malignant spirits in the forest and refuses to shepherd them through the evil, they decide to leave him tied to a tree, stripped to his underwear, bulging through the rope like a Gengoroh Tagame drawing. He escapes, but without a signal to reach his boyfriend back home, or anyone outside of the wooded hills, he descends further into limbo. Fernando's scientific rationalism, which at first treats his new surroundings and its inhabitants with a harried, anthropological remove, slowly gives way to a ramshackle spiritual immersion of grave historical import.

Director Rodrigues is contending with the lingering effects of Portuguese colonialism, pitting Fernando against the religious iconography his country once imprinted on its colonies. The story of Saint Anthony is thrust onto him, albeit in deliriously homoerotic fashion, whether it's getting urinated on by pagans or going skinny dipping with a deaf-mute goat herder named, you guessed it, Jesus. In a review of "Salo" and "Porcile," critic Jonathan Rosenbaum relays a friend's complaint that, "[t]he problem with Pasoliniis that he wants to be fucked by Jesus and Marx at the same time."

With "The Ornithologist," Rodrigues demonstrates how that's not a problem at all.

Directed by Joao Pedro Rodrigues, screening all week at the Parkway Theatre.

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5 Big Things To Know And Celebrate About GK Chesterton – The Federalist

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Reading G.K. Chestertons work is a bit like a personal encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Present, from Charles Dickenss A Christmas Carol. Hes a larger-than-life figure, with a writing style thats both jovial and cutting. He paints a picture of reality you want to embrace, and he depicts whats wrong with our world in a way that spurs the reader to action.

Thus today it seems fitting, especially considering the ideological rancor and spiritual disenchantment of our nation, to consider some of the best components of Chestertons workand to encourage contemporary readers to know him better, man.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton grew up in London, and was baptized into the Church of England, although he described himself as an agnostic throughout his teen years. He embraced Anglicanism after his marriage, then converted to Catholicism in 1922.

Chestertons literary career began while working for publishing houses in London. He became a journalist, an art and literary critic, and the Daily News gave him a weekly opinion column in 1902. He went on to produce regular radio broadcasts, as well.

Among his early works, Chestertons Father Brown mysteries are undoubtedly his most successful and well known. In them, a bumbling yet thoughtful priest uncovers crime via his deep understanding of human nature. Another of his famous novels, The Man Who Was Thursday, turns our pompous ideologies on their head, promising a truth too powerful, mysterious, and even jovial for us to imagine.

Chesterton was 64 and weighed nearly 300 pounds. He wore a crumpled hat and a cape, often walking about with a cigar in his mouth. He was an astoundingly prolific writercrafting thousands of essays, hundreds of poems and short stories, and 80 books throughout his lifetime. Theres perhaps no better introduction to his work than this, from James Parker writing for The Atlantic in 2015:

In his vastness and mobility, Chesterton continues to elude definition: He was a Catholic convert and an oracular man of letters, a pneumatic cultural presence, an aphorist with the production rate of a pulp novelist. Poetry, criticism, fiction, biography, columns, public debatethe phenomenon known to early-20th-century newspaper readers as GKC was half cornucopia, half content mill. If youve got a couple of days, read his impish, ageless, inside-out terrorist thrillerThe Man Who Was Thursday. If youve got an afternoon, read his masterpiece of Christian apologeticsOrthodoxy: ontological basics retailed with a blissful, zooming frivolity, Thomas Aquinas meets Eddie Van Halen. If youve got half an hour, read The Blue Cross, the first and most glitteringly perfect of his stories featuring the crime-busting village priest Father Brown. If youve got only 10 minutes, read his essay A Much Repeated Repetition. (Of a mechanical thing we have a full knowledge. Of a living thing we have a divine ignorance.)

Chesterton was a journalist; he was a metaphysician. He was a reactionary; he was a radical. He was a modernist, acutely alive to the rupture in consciousness that produced Eliots The Hollow Men; he was an anti-modernist (he hated Eliots The Hollow Men). He was a parochial Englishman and a post-Victorian gasbag; he was a mystic wedded to eternity. All of these cheerfully contradictory things are true, and none of them would matter in the slightest were it not for the final, resolving fact that he was a genius.

Chesterton shared a lifelong friendship with George Bernard Shaw, the renowned Irish playwright and critic whose theological bent was decidedly counter to Chestertons. Shaw opposed organized religion and promoted eugenics, admired Stalin and Lenin, and termed himself at times an atheist or a mystic. Yet Shaw called Chesterton a man of colossal genius, and the two enjoyed a strong camaraderie:

If I were as fat as you, I would hang myself, Shaw once told Chesterton.

If I were to hang myself, I would use you for the rope, Chesterton replied.

In the introduction to a biography he wrote about Shaw, Chesterton wrote, Most people say that they agree with Bernard Shaw or that they do not understand him. I am the only person who understands him, and I do not agree with him.

The two men declare to us, schismatic and prejudiced against the other as we often are, that there can be such a thing as friendly enemies. We can enjoy the company of those different from us, even of those doggedly opposed to us. To have such friendships, however, we need a hearty dose of Chestertonian mirth: the ability to laugh at and with others, and most of all, to laugh heartily at ourselves.

Last month Jesse Singal wrote a fascinating essay on the birth of the self-esteem movement in America. During this span [the 1980s and 1990s], just abouteveryone, from CEOs to welfare recipients, was told often by psychologists with serious credentials that improving their self-esteem could unlock the gates to more happiness, better performance, and every kind of success imaginable, Singal notes. He goes on:

It would be hard to overstate the long-term impact of these claims. The self-esteem craze changed how countless organizations were run, how an entire generation millenials was educated, and how that generation went on to perceive itself (quite favorably). As it turned out, the central claim underlying the trend, that theres a causal relationship between self-esteem and various positive outcomes, was almost certainly inaccurate. But that didnt matter: For millions of people, this was just too good and satisfying a story to check, and thats part of the reason the national focus on self-esteem never fully abated. Many peoplestillbelieve that fostering a sense of self-esteem is just about the most important thing one can do, mental healthwise.

But the self-esteem movement, although it may have catapulted into pop cultural acclaim during the 1980s and 90s, didnt begin there. When Chesterton wrote his classic book Orthodoxy in 1908, he wrote it primarily as a response to the claim that believing in yourself was key to success and happiness.

I know of men who believe in themselves more than Napoleon or Caesar, he writes in the first chapter. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

Chesterton argues that Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. One of my favorite quotes, from the books opening pages, is thisnot just a response to self-confident lunacy, but one which addresses our everyday temptations to self-centeredness:

But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.

Living as we do in a society of snowflakes and psychiatrists, such a prescription for happiness seems strange indeed. But the moment I see myself not as the most perfect snowflake in the world, but as one among many flawed, complicated human beings, Im set free from my tiny and tawdry theatre.

Chesterton, much like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, spoke overwhelmingly to our cultures increasing disenchantment, its imaginatively sterile and dour perception of the world. Chesterton prescribed mystery and enchantment as an antidote to this state of things, suggesting that we needed something more than logic in order to transcend madness and insanity: Mysticism keeps men sane, he writes in Orthodoxy.

As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the gnostic of today) free also to believe in them.

The fairy tale awakens our minds to the enchanted, mysterious nature of the real world we live in. It opens us to the possibility that mere atoms and molecules might be full of divine glory.

These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember what we forget.

Many of the best works of literatureGeorge MacDonalds Phantastes, Lewiss Out of the Silent Planet, Tolkiens Lord of the Rings, J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter, and countless othersfill us with a desperate longing for a moment, time, or feeling we havent fully encountered or experienced, but one that we want desperately.

Lewis described this as joy, a heaven-longing in our souls. He spent his entire life chasing it before he found it in Christianity. From the Norse mythologies of his youth to the wanderings and wonder of Narnia, Lewis wanted to capture this joy and hold on to it. But he found thatat least in this worldits a fleeting feeling. Chesterton suggests to us that this joy is a wild acknowledgement of mystery and meaning that floods us, then leaves us. Fairy tales make these moments possible.

Fairy tales founded in me two convictions, he writes. First, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness.

Many picture Christianity as either two horrid things: the first, a sort of dour and austere asceticism, which eschews the joys and pleasures of this world and embraces instead a gray and joyless religion. The second is a hypocritical malevolence, in which we say all sorts of sympathetic things, but act in an authoritarian, graceless way (see The Handmaids Tale).

Chesterton crushes both of these conceptions of Christianity, and defies them as heresy. He makes obvious the joy and mirth in our God, in the way he works and in the world he created. But he also points out that true Christian virtues are consistent, grace-filled, and glorious.

As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering it shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers.

Regardless of what you believe, I challenge you to read G.K. Chesterton this summer. Take to heart his thoughtful, incisive, jovial criticisms of our culture. Consider his critique of rationalism, and the way it strips our world of meaning and mystery.

As for me, tonight, Im going to read a fairy tale.

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5 Big Things To Know And Celebrate About GK Chesterton - The Federalist

Trump yearbook censorship: Wall teacher is a registered Democrat – Asbury Park Press

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Grant Berardo, a Wall High School junior, saw his image digitally altered with a plain black T-shirt in his yearbook. Mike Davis

Wall Township High School junior Grant Berardo's T-shirt was digitally altered in the school's yearbook. He wore a Donald Trump campaign shirt for his portrait.(Photo: Courtesy of Joseph Berardo, Jr.)

WALL -The teacher at the center of a censorship scandal in the Wall High School yearbook is a registered Democrat, according to public records.

Susan Parsons, 62, was suspended from her position as a digital media teacher and yearbook adviser on Monday after two students reported their school pictures were altered in the yearbook to remove references to President Donald Trump.

According to the Monmouth County election board, Parsons is a registered Democrat. She voted in the November 2016 general election but public records do not indicate which candidate she voted for.

ICYMI: Wall High teacher suspended over alleged Trump yearbook censorship

MORE INFO: Wall teen's Trump shirt censored in yearbook

But the young Trump supporters believe they were slighted specifically.

Grant Berardo, a junior at the school, took his school pictures wearing a navy blue "Make America Great Again" shirt from the campaign. But in the yearbook, his photo had been digitally altered so it resembled a nondescript black T-shirt, which you can see in the video at the top of the story.

It was Photoshopped," Grant said in an interview on Friday. "I sent it to my mom and dad, just like You wont believe this. I was just overall disappointed.

"I like Trump, but its history too. Wearing that shirt memorializes the time," he said.

Wall High School(Photo: File photo)

According to CNN, Wyatt and Montana Dobrovich-Fago also alleged censorship. The Trump logo on Wyatt's sweater vest in his picture was seemingly cropped out. And a quote attributed to Trump was inexplicably left out of a section dedicated to Montana's role as freshman class president.

Traditionally, class presidents pick a quote to accompany their picture.

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"I like thinking big. If you are going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big," Trump's quote read.

Though none of the students were able to vote in last year's election, they certainly aren't alone in their support of Trump.

Wall is a strongly Republicantown in a strongly Republican county. All five Township Committee members and Monmouth County freeholders are Republican, andthe town is represented by Republicans in the state Senate, Assembly and House of Representatives.

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Last year, the number of Trump voters nearly doubledthe 5,000 who voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. About 61 percent, just over 9,400 voters,in Wall supported Trump.

In Parsons'voting district, 434 people voted for Trump. Just 172 voted for Clinton.

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According to her LinkedIn page, Parsons has worked in the district for 15 years.

On her yearbook class'website within the district homepage, Parsonsincludes "photo editing" as one of the "real world skills" that students learn during yearbook production.

An office manager at the Wall Township Education Association, the district's teacher union, said there was no one there who could comment. Union officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Parsons has not returned multiple calls to her home seeking comment. Nobody answered the door at her listed address in Wall.

In an interview with the New York Post, Parsons said we have never made any action against any political party.

But when asked if she knew who altered the photos, Parsons simply said, Im going to hang up.

Mike Davis: 732-643-4223; mdavis@gannettnj.com

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Trump yearbook censorship: Wall teacher is a registered Democrat - Asbury Park Press

Feminists and Social Justice Activists Call for Video Game Developer Censorship Blacklist – Heat Street

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Thought policing is alive and well in the new media as social justice activists ramp up their crusade to silence and de-platform wrongthinkers from producing content within their medium, citing issues as nebulous as cyberviolence as reasons to censor those who oppose progressive ideology.

Following the explosion of outrage against an independent game developer who once expressed views critical of feminism in the video game industry, outrage warriors are now calling for the industry to enact strict rules against hiring and associating with developers whose views do not align with feminist orthodoxy. The target of their ire, Tim Soret, is producing a game called The Last Night, which went viral at E3 2017 after its reveal.

As developers, collaborators, publishers we have to vet those we work with, wrote Maya Felix Kramer, a queer activist and PR person in the indie game scene.

Kramer, who lists they/them pronouns in her bio and sits on the board for Feminist Frequency, and manages Fez developer Polytron, has worked withZoe Quinn, Christine Love, and numerous other large personalities in the gaming scene. Her words have been magnified and re-tweeted by hundreds of game developers and high-profile game journalists.

If that sounds too bleak, youre in a position of privilege, continued Kramer. We have to make our entities, companies, and studios have public policies and then hold our collaborators to those policies. We have to.

Referencing Soret, who had a good reputation prior to Zoe Quinns call to arms against him, Kramer wrote: We can no longer afford to say we didnt know or they seem nice many people havent had this luxury in a long time. Welcome to 2017.

Among many others, game designer Jennifer Scheurle echoed Kramers call with a tweet of her own.

Essentially calling for a blacklist or the creation of a sort of Games Code Authority against developers guilty of wrongthink, Kramer and her supporters are outraged by game developers and products that do not partake in their crusade for social justice.

I would urge those who want to see the world grow and progress to make sure they align themselves only with people who share those dreams, wrote Kramer.

Censoring media to fit a narrative is an impediment to creative expression. As it was with comic books and the Comics Code Authority in the 1950s, history shows that institutionalizing rules and forcing compliance for acceptable or prohibited content only condemns a creative medium to rot in the ghetto of hollow art.

Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at@stillgray on Twitterand onFacebook.

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Feminists and Social Justice Activists Call for Video Game Developer Censorship Blacklist - Heat Street

Dozens of news sites blocked as Egypt ramps up digital censorship – Amnesty International

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The Egyptian authorities have shifted their onslaught against media freedom to the digital sphere, blocking access to more than 40 news sites without justification in recent weeks, in an attempt to eliminate the countrys last remaining spaces for criticism and free expression, said Amnesty International.

At least 63 websites have been blocked in total since 24 May according to the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, including 48 news sites. Mada Masr, an independent news site which regularly published news and analysis deeply critical of the authorities was among the first to be blocked. Most recently on 11 June the Egyptian news sites Albedaiah, run by independent journalist Khaled al Balshy, Elbadil and Bawabit Yanair were blocked. Access to the global online publishing platform Medium was also cut off on 10 June.

The latest clampdown on digital media is further evidence of Egypts age-old police state tactics in motion. Even in the darkest days of the repressive Mubarak era the authorities didnt cut off access to all independent news sites, said Najia Bounaim, Amnesty Internationals North Africa Campaigns director.

With this move the Egyptian authorities seem to be targeting the few remaining spaces for free expression in the country. It shows just how determined the authorities are to prevent Egyptians from accessing independent reporting, analysis and opinion about Egypt. The authorities must immediately stop arbitrarily blocking news websites.

With this move the Egyptian authorities seem to be targeting the few remaining spaces for free expression in the country

On 24 May, state media announced that Egyptian authorities had blocked a group of websitesincluding the prominent independent news platforms Mada Masr, Daily News Egypt, Elborsa and Masr Al Arabia. The authorities failed to provide any evidence of illegal activity or to clarify the legal basis for the decision. Instead officials made vague statements to the media saying this was in connection with publishing false information and supporting terrorism.

On 25 May, Egyptian newspapers published reports citing a sovereign agency (a term usually used to refer to Egyptian intelligence agencies) justifying the move on the grounds of combating terrorism and accusing Qatar of supporting some of the blocked websites, again without providing evidence.

Amnesty International has reviewed the list of blocked websites. The majority are news sites but the list also includes sites where VPN and TOR, which can be used to access blocked sites, can be downloaded. Amnesty International was able to identify only one website connected to groups that use or advocate violence.

Many of the sites that have been blocked had served as a refuge for Egypts remaining critical voices who no longer are allowed to appear on TV or in the print media, which have been firmly in the grip of the state since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power.

The independent news and analysis website Mada Masr is known for unflinchingly exposing human rights violations committed by the Egyptian authorities in recent years, including arbitrary detention, unfair trials, the crackdown on human rights NGOs, extrajudicial executions and the use of the death penalty.

The sites editor-in-chief, Lina Attallah, told Amnesty International that she believes the site was blocked because it publishes well-researched investigations based on verified information. We publish what authorities dont want people to read, she said.

The Egyptian government appears to be exploiting recent violent attacks by armed groups in the country to crack down on the remaining free space and silence critical voices. Once again the authorities are using national security grounds to justify outright repression, said Najia Bounaim.

Instead of attacking critical and independent voices Egypt should respect the obligations enshrined in its own constitution and in international law not to impose arbitrary restrictions on freedom of expression and to protect the right of everyone to seek, receive and share information.

Once again the authorities are using national security grounds to justify outright repression

The governments decision to block these websites also flouts Egypts constitution, which prohibits censorship of the media, except at times of war and military mobilization, and protects freedom of expression and press freedom both in print and digital formats. The constitution also upholds the right of all citizens to use telecommunication tools and methods.

The legal grounds and authority the government has used to block these sites is ambiguous and it remains unclear whether emergency law provisions were applied. There are, however, a number of Egyptian laws that can be used to censor the media and the internet, on the grounds of national security.

After the bombing of two churches in Tanta and Alexandria in April 2017, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi declared a three-month state of emergency. An hour later, the authorities confiscated that days edition of Albawaba newspaper, which demanded that the Minister of Interior be held accountable for failing to prevent the bombing.

Under emergency laws, the authorities have broad powers to impose surveillance and censorship on media. On 10 April, the head of the Egyptian parliament, Dr Ali Abdelal announced that these laws will extend to social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. He added that these platforms were being used as means of communication between terrorists and warned that online offenders would face prosecution.

The vaguely worded articles of Egypts counterterrorism law also allow punishments of up to 15 years in prison for establishing a website for the purpose of promoting terrorist ideas and grant the authorities the power to block websites suspected of promoting terrorism.

Two of the blocked websites, Daily News Egypt and Elborsa, belong to the Business News Company, which is licensed by the government. In November 2016, the government froze the companys assets under the pretext that it belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, without providing evidence to support this claim. The papers 230 staff have not received their salaries since.

Representatives of many of the websites affected have filed complaints with the Press Syndicate, the National Council for Media, the Ministry Communications and the Public Prosecutor, but so far received no response. Mada Masr has filed an appeal against the decision to block its website before an administrative court, but it has not yet heard the appeal.

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Dozens of news sites blocked as Egypt ramps up digital censorship - Amnesty International