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Original Disneyland concept art shows what park would have looked like

LOS ANGELES Tomorrowland was originally going to be called World of Tomorrow. Frontierland was Frontier Country. Lilliputian Land never became a reality at Disneyland. And no one could have foreseen a Wars land opening in 2019.

Walt Disney spent a marathon weekend in 1953 brainstorming ideas for the new family amusement park he Hermes enamel necklace fake envisioned called Disneyland. There would be a train station and an old fashioned Main Street square. The park would have a princess castle and a pirate ship, maybe even a rocket. Disney wanted to get investors on board, so he described the various elements he imagined to artist Herb Ryman, who translated them into a hand imitation Hermes necklace drawn map Disneyland first.

Collector Ron Clark knew the map was special when he Hermes white gold necklace knock off acquired it 40 years ago from a former Disney employee who been friends with Walt Disney. Clark says he felt a of presence as soon as he saw the 3 1/2 foot by 5 1/2 knock off Hermes necklace foot ink and pencil drawing on paper affixed to a tri fold poster board like a science fair display.

had this aura, he recalled. just kind of puts you in awe that this is the piece that came out of Walt Disney mind and this is what came about: this park, these parks worldwide, the passion people have for it today and the happiness of hundreds of millions who have graced these lands. started collecting Disney items in the 1960s. He saw a small silver spoon in a Disneyland souvenir shop and plunked down $10 for it. When he later saw that same spoon show up as a collectors item in a Disney fan magazine, he was hooked.

have an affection for the man and what he created. It just brought us and our family such joy, said Clark, who still holds an annual pass to Disneyland and makes it out to Southern California from Utah at least three times a year to visit the park.

20 of our grandbabies are Disney fied, he said.

Clark collection focuses on the dawn of Disney. The earliest piece is an Ingersoll watch from 1928 and the most spectacular is the map. But with his 70th birthday approaching, Clark wanted to see about finding a more permanent home for his prized piece of memorabilia.

was always my desire to somehow return it to Disney, he said. wanted it to go home. For 40 years, that has been my wish. spokesman John McClintock wouldn say if park officials will be among the bidders when the map goes up for auction June 25.

He was familiar with the piece, though, calling it very speculative drawing. was drawn to make people think this is going to be a great park, he said.

Walt Disney Parks and Resorts still produce concept art for new park features. The company released a full colour image last year of the proposed Wars land, complete with an X wing fighter flying overhead. The 14 acre Wars expansion represents the biggest ever at Disneyland, McClintock said, though the park has been evolving almost since it opened in 1955. The Enchanted Tiki Room opened in 1963. The Small World ride came in 1966, followed by Pirates of the Caribbean in 1967. The official Disneyland Hotel opened in 1988. A whole new park, Disney California Adventure, and accompanying Grand Californian Hotel were added in 2001.

None of those elements were part of Ryman 1953 sketch. It hard to compare concepts from that original map with what actually exists in the park today, McClintock said.

predates any work on Disneyland and it doesn really resemble Disneyland, so you can really use that as a template for how the park developed, he said, noting that the famous Sleeping Beauty Castle that sits in the centre of the park is shown much further back in the concept sketch.

Other elements though, including the train station and Main Street square, look the same on the map as they do at the park in Anaheim, California.

story behind the art is that it was all done in a weekend, McClintock said. amazing that they got as much right as they did. the auctioneer, whose Van Eaton Galleries are full of Disney animation cells, old park souvenirs and even the googly eyed sea monster from the now shuttered Submarine Voyage ride, the pre Disneyland map is ultimate. After spending the past four decades locked away in a vault, the map will be on view for the public at the gallery in the weeks leading up to the auction.
Aug 29 '17 · 0 comments
Rakhi Sawant seeks anticipatory bail

23:05 Rakhi Sawant seeks anticipatory bail, to get transit one: Fearing arrest for allegedly making offensive remarks against sage Valmiki, Bollywood actor Rakhi Sawant today sought anticipatory bail from the Bombay high court, which said it would give her 'transit bail' instead.

Justice Ajey Gadkari, before whom her plea came up for hearing, said he would grant the actress a 'transit bail' for the period of travel to Punjab to enable her seek pre arrest bail from the court which had issued the warrant against her.

21:52 Senate confirms Neil Gorsuch to Supreme Court: The New York Times reports:

Judge Neil M Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate on Friday to become the 113th justice of the Supreme Court, capping a political brawl that lasted for more than a year and tested constitutional norms inside the Capitol's fraying upper chamber.

The development was a signal triumph for President Donald Trump, whose campaign last year rested in large part on his pledge to appoint another committed conservative to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016.

Judge Gorsuch, 49, could serve on the court for 30 years or more.

21:26 2 accused in Dadri lynching case granted bail: The Allahabad high court has granted bail to two persons named as accused in the Dadri lynching case of Noida, where a middle aged man was beaten to death by a mob more than a year ago on suspicion of cow slaughter.

A single judge bench of Justice Umesh Chandra Srivastava granted bail to Arun and Puneet, both of whom were lodged in a jail in Greater Noida in connection with the killing of Mohd Akhlaq, a resident of Bisada village in Dadri tehsil of Gautam Buddh Nagar district, in 2015.

A mob had gathered outside Akhlaq's house on the night of September 28 after it was announced over the loudspeaker of a temple in the village that he had stolen a calf and Hermes necklace fake consumed its meat.

The mob thereafter barged into the house, beating Akhlaq to death and leaving his son Danish severely injured. PTI19:30 copy Hermes yellow gold necklace Stockholm: 3 killed as man drives van into crowd near Indian Embassy: At least three people were killed as knock off Hermes yellow gold necklace a van drove into a crowd of people outside a busy department store in central Stockholm today, police said.

Swedish media reported that several shots were also fired.

The attack happened just 100 metres away from the Indian Embassy.

As per embassy sources in Stockholm all embassy local and Indian staff are safe.

'Police received a call from SOS Alarm that a person in a vehicle has injured other people on Drottninggatan,' police wrote on Twitter.

The incident occurred just before 1 pm (local time) near the city's biggest pedestrian street. Agencies18:55 Alwar lynching: NHRC sends notice to Centre, Rajasthan: The National Human Rights Commission has issued notices to the Centre and the Rajasthan government over the lynching of a man allegedly by cow vigilantes in Alwar.

The commission termed the incident as 'painful' and 'serious violation' of human rights saying 'self proclaimed' volunteers are creating an atmosphere of fear in the society.

In the notice issued to the Rajasthan chief secretary, the commission has called for a detailed report in the matter along with action taken against the culprits.

A notice has also been issued to the Union home secretary, calling for a response as to what steps have been taken or proposed to be taken by the Centre to deal with such incidents in the country.

They have been asked to respond Hermes imitation necklace within four weeks. PTI

18:01 UP has more than half of approved abattoirs in India: govt: Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP government is clamping down on "illegal" slaughterhouses, accounts for more than half of the approved abattoirs and meat processing plants in the country, the Centre today said.

Minister of State for Health Faggan Singh Kulaste in a written reply in Lok Sabha said licenses have been issued to around 1,700 slaughterhouses by the country's food regulator FSSAI. According to figures given by Kulaste, Uttar Pradesh has 42 out of the total 76 approved abattoirs cum meat processing plants or standalone abattoirs.

Maharashtra is second with 13 abattoirs while Punjab and Andhra Pradesh had five approved abattoirs each.
Aug 29 '17 · 0 comments
Queens Bookshop Initiative Exceeds Fundraising Goal

When the only two Barnes and Noble bookstore locations in Queens closed last year, it left book lovers in the borough with a void. But, three women just reached a big fund raising milestone in their effort to give readers more options. NY1's Hermes Birkin bag replica Van Tieu filed the following report on the Queens Bookshop initiative.

With Kickstarter campaigns, it's all or Hermes handbag fake nothing. So, the trio behind the fund raising campaign to open a new bookstore handbag Hermes copy in Queens now have something big to celebrate.

Their small business journey started when the only two Barnes and Noble bookstore locations in Queens closed last year. It left book lovers in the borough with a void.

There's only one general, English bookstore left in the borough in Astoria. So, the group started the Queens Bookstore Initiative to give readers in Queens more options.

"It was really exciting and joyous and now it's back to work!" Nikodem says.

Now that the initiative is funded, Nikodem says they're hard at work opening accounts with publishers and vendors. They want to open a permanent, brick and mortar store by the end of the year, but for now they will open pop up bookshops in Queens.

The first pop up shop will begin at the Red Pipe Cafe in Forest Hills starting Thursday. They will sell used books. The group will also continue selling books and merchandise at the LIC Flea on Saturdays.

They say the support they've received speaks volumes about the need for more book stores and small businesses.

"Even though there seems to be this great narrative that bookshops are dead and E readers will rule the world, it Hermes bag copy doesn't seem to be true," Nikodem says.
Aug 29 '17 · 0 comments
Pop's unlikely star magnet

Foy Vance is showing me the tattoo on his left forearm. It's a line from his song Guiding Light "When I need to get home, you're the light that guides me" translated into Gaelic and written in Ed Sheeran's handwriting. Sheeran has the same thing on his arm, in Vance's handwriting. It must be serious then.

"It's such a bromance, isn't it? I do dote on the wee fella," says the 41 year old, 16 years Sheeran's senior. It progressed to writing together (Tenerife Sea and Afire Love on Sheeran's x album) and playing together in venues as momentous as Madison Square Garden and Wembley Stadium.

Now they're taking things up another notch. Sheeran has signed his friend to his nascent Gingerbread Man record label, a means for this energetic music fan to give less well known musicians artistic freedom and a bigger platform. It means Vance's third album, The Wild Swan, arrives next month with a giant ginger stamp of approval.

"Ed has been a blessing, because he didn't want me to feel any pressure. He wanted me to go and make whatever record I felt I wanted to make, and he would deal with the outcome," Vance tells me. Sir Elton John has a credit as The Wild Swan's executive producer and will take Vance around on his tour of more giant venues this summer.

"He's been a supporter more than anything. He's been involved since the beginning, listening. I'm sending stuff to him all the time. He's a very informative guy, quite analytical about necklace Hermes fake it. He knows music inside out."

These superstar thumbs ups should mean that this time Vance gets the attention he deserves. He's risen to the occasion with new songs that see his low, gruff voice sounding mightier than ever. The influence of his countryman Van Morrison is obvious on the nostalgic ballad Bangor Town, he's got some New Orleans swing on Upbeat Feelgood and he does beautiful traditional folk on the title track, inspired by W B Yeats's poem The Wild Swans at Coole.

He also sounds a little like Sheeran on the steady acoustic pulse of She Burns but actually they don't seem to have a great deal in common. Vance lives in the small Highland town of Aberfeldy in Scotland, where he is the primary carer of his teenage daughter. Before she started secondary school he would take her on tour, where he educated her in his own idiosyncratic way. "She would collect the merch, count the T shirts in and out, which is much better than, 'If Peter has two apples and Paul has five'"

He lived in south London for seven years but it wasn't for him. "As much as it is the greatest city in the world that's not up for debate to live in London I was having to gig every hole in the wall to keep the dream alive. It was so expensive. I couldn't make plans. I found it really hard to be in London and think clearly. You need time and you need silence."

He was invited to play a gig in an art gallery in Aberfeldy, and realised where he really wanted to be. "It genuinely was like moving from the humdrum of the music industry to the haunts of the ancient bards. There are many poets who came through those lands and wrote because they were inspired, and it takes you two minutes to see why."

I'm tickled by the idea of this middle aged countryside enthusiast with a twirly moustache and a hole in his cap getting drunk in New York with Beyonc and Jay Z ("they were just lovely, down to earth folks. I kept calling him Jay Zed"), going to parties at the Los Angeles home of Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad and writing a new song, Coco, about Courtney Cox's daughter.

It's easy to see why they all like him. With twinkling eyes, a lilting voice and a pencil permanently behind his ear which he uses to write my book recommendation for him on the back of a coaster he seems like a man who could tell stories all night and have plenty left over for breakfast. He sinks three pints of beer during our afternoon conversation and is keen for me to turn the dictaphone off and go and play pool with Hermes Kelly handbag imitation him.

Sheeran has said: "Every time I see him play I get annoyed that more people handbag Hermes replica don't know about him." But I get the impression that Vance isn't that bothered about being known. He'll play to Sheeran's massive crowds and drink with the celebs in the golden circle but leave again when it suits him. "Ed's a lot younger than me and he's happy to work his balls off touring the world for seven years straight. I've got a kid, I'm not interested in that. What I have is a desire to live. I want to work a couple of months and then go home, fix the shed and cut the grass."

We talk about the increased expectations for commercial success for his music, now that he has the backing of Sheeran the record label boss as well as Sheeran the friend. He's not expecting too much. "I see a lot of people who have more of a desire for the world fame than they do for Hermes handbag replica the music, and something is majorly lost in that process," he says. "So I guess what I'm saying is, if that was to come and let's face it, you and I both know that is not gonna happen but if it was, it would be on the terms of what it is. There shouldn't be any compromise. If this record doesn't do well I still know I did right by it."

By that rationale, there's nothing at all riding on this, his best opportunity to do well. Foy Vance has succeeded already.

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Aug 29 '17 · 0 comments
Out in force on the mean streets

The New Zealand Herald7:15am Wed 24 MayNetworkMembers of the South Auckland Ferguson Neighbourhood Policing Team, from left, Constable Silao Nansen, Sergeant Jonathan Milne and Constable Junior Te'o. Photo / Silao Nansen

Reporter Andrew Laxon and photographer Greg Bowker follow a team of police finding alternative ways to curb crime in South Auckland's Otara triangle

Wednesday afternoon in Otara. At a small block of shops in a suburban back street, a couple of men haul cases of beer out of a car and into a liquor store crammed with wall to wall beer, spirits and pre mixes.

Inside Sergeant Jonathan Milne tackles store owner Jack Kalkat about selling alcohol the week before to two young men on a 24 hour drinking spree. Milne saw them leave the shop, stagger drunkenly down the street past school children and rip off a street sign.

Kalkat insists it can't have been his staff. Maybe the boys got the alcohol somewhere else, he suggests.

No, says Milne firmly, they bought it here. He mentions the importance of breaches when the store's liquor licence comes up for review, chats briefly with the staff and leaves.

So why is the head of the local neighbourhood policing team, who describes his patch as "probably the toughest area of policing in New Zealand", putting so much effort into a bottle store? Because, says Milne, it's their job to hermes gold bracelet replica attack the causes of crime and both police and the community are sick of the damage the Everitt Rd liquor store causes.

"We would see a mum pushing a pram we've got photos of them going in and buying boxes during the day and going out."

One Thursday night he watched a van unload boxes of bourbon and cola, fake hermes H bracelet black filling the store to the ceiling.

"I remember being pretty passionate and saying, 'You guys are disgraceful. You're a negative influence on this area'."Related ContentThin blue line gets thicker in toughest crime areas Garth George: Brighter future for law and order Truant's mum says hermes bracelet imitation ministry action 'sucks'

Kalkat told the Weekend Herald his staff did their best to stop breaches, including underage drinking. "But sometimes [the kids] send someone else in. You can't stop that."

Milne doesn't agree. He says his team found a shed about 100m away from the store with 14 teenagers playing truant and drinking inside.

They recovered some bottles of pre mixed spirits in a school bag and tracked down the boy who stole them but that was just the tip of the iceberg.

"What our staff saw was another 20 empty boxes in that shed. So this was a bigger picture we needed to [look at] and it all came from that liquor store."

Milne is a stocky, ginger haired 46 year old with a passion for his job. A former amateur boxer, he grew up in the gyms of Mangere in the era of Jimmy "Thunder" Peau and once ran an out of town adventure programme for South Auckland kids.

He spent four years as a frontline sergeant in Otara and ran youth and community services in the suburb. His wife is part Maori but he admits that doesn't give him much street cred in an overwhelmingly Pacific area, compared with his Samoan colleagues Junior Te'o, Silao Nansen and Papa Talosaga (who has his own show on Samoan radio).

Milne and his team of six constables work in the so called Otara triangle, which lies south of the shopping centre, bounded by the Southern Motorway, East Tamaki Rd and Preston Rd.

To the outsider, it looks like hermes mens bracelet replica an ordinary collection of single and double storey state houses from the 1960s, with more than the usual number of schools, churches and bottle stores. A line of pylons runs through the middle alongside Bairds Rd, Otara's main drag.
Aug 29 '17 · 0 comments
Primitivism in Modern Art and Freud

Modern paintings sometimes use abstraction to evade the rules of physical perception and depict what cannot ordinarily be seen. Time, movement, emotion and sound are such phenomena, more accessible to abstract and Surrealist painting than to other static visual arts.

Franz Kline developed a black and white style in which brush strokes "expand as entities in themselves" from a suggestion of Hermes Collier de Chien Bracelet replica Willem de Kooning that he works with an optical projector for source material. In Chief, a painting now at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, he methodically abstracted the central mass and dynamic arcs of the profile of a locomotive in close up with expansive brushstrokes that create the illusion of impulsive, gestural movements.

Modern wall art like Kline and Jackson Pollock calls attention to the process of artistic creation vividly. In his book What Painting Is, James Elkins writes, "A painter knows what to do by the tug of the brush as it pulls through a mixture of oils, and by the look of colored slurries on the palette."

Modern paintings date from the 1860s to the fake hermes H bracelet Black gold 1970s, and early intellectual influences in modern art have survived in different forms over generations of experimentation with abstraction and, ultimately, "pure" art. Primitivism, a driving interest of Sigmund Freud work, is one of those early influences. In his own office, African wall art with abstract and primitive elements dominated the room.

The father of modern psychology followed Darwin lead in search of underlying principles of behavior that could scientifically explain the life of the mind. Together with the work of anthropologists like Claud Levi Strauss, Freudian psychology established the primitive as an authentic subject for fundamental science.

This fundamental science would one day give rise to evolutionary theories of cognition so detailed they explain the minutiae of biases to which scientists themselves are prone, just as Freud relied on self analysis (in the mix up of the names of two Renaissance painters) to develop the concept now known as a "Freudian slip."

To develop a theory Collier de Chien hermes bracelet copy of human behavior, Freud analyzed ancient myths and tribal archetypes in search of abstract, governing forms of imaginative experience. Freud also argued, in Civilization and its Discontents, that a life unlike that of our primordial ancestors is in some ways biologically unnatural, and that modernity is mostly defined by a psychological struggle against deeply rooted human instincts.

Expressionist painters and other modernists of the early 20th century shared both this interest in tribal or primitive art and interest in remote peoples with comparatively primitive access to technology as interlocutors of the modern subject. In the case of Paul Gauguin, a friend of Van Gogh an opportunity to live and work in Martinique led to fascinating experiments in style influenced by Cezanne, Japanese prints and the lives of people he met in the tropics.

Primitivism appealed on many levels to Gauguin. It provided a means to resist bourgeois material culture, revise the meanings of its symbols, and transcend the art world repressed access to decadence. Mystical syncretism helped create a non exclusionary visual language for expressionists in an era that produced modern paintings as Gauguin "Where do we come from?"What are we? Where are we going?

At once tribal and universalist in its stylized treatment of archetypal subjects for the imagination, the art Freud favored anticipated much modern wall art in the use of hedonist themes and hermes H bracelet replica surrealist forms. Picasso drew inspiration from primitivism in his choice of subjects for cubist art as well. But modern painters would gradually leave behind the figurative and develop systems of self reflecting organization that allow a painting use of interior space to be its own subject, instead of depicting an external subject.

Here, the fundamental sciences of matter are sometimes invoked to draw attention to the process of visual perception and the nature of the visually real. Modern paintings sometimes have a jewel like faceted effect realizing what Matisse referred to as a "symphonic structure" that transcends the image. In his own work, Matisse used simple lines and reductionist depictions of objects, sometimes flattened into a single plane, to exploit the interior dynamics of a canvas.

The hedonist and essentialist elements of primitivism survived in visually stunning departures from realism as Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase. The imaginative syncretism that gives primitive art its magical connotations found expression in surrealist paintings as Harlequin Carnival and the work of Salvador Dali, as well. But ultimately, "pure" art would leave behind discernible subjects of this nature, in favor of work as Piet Mondian Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue and Black, a geometric symphony of primary colors. Modern wall art often shares this minimalist use of color, line, volume and shape to create beauty that is not a representation of anything outside itself.

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Aug 29 '17 · 0 comments
or how to feel like a jerk in Mombasa

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

The fluorescent circus of Election 2016 that spectacle of yellow comb overs, and orange skin, and predatory pussy grabbing, and last minute FBI interventions, and blinking memes hewn by an underground army of self important internet trolls has finally come to its unnatural end. I had looked forward to this moment, only to find us all instantly embroiled in a new crisis. And unfortunately, it's easy to foretell what, or rather who, will move into the bright lights of our collective gaze now: we're going to (continue to) focus on. . . well, ourselves.

We are obviously not, for instance, going to redeploy our energies toward examining the embarrassing war that we're still waging in Afghanistan, now in its 16th year something that went practically unmentioned during election season, even as fighting heated up there. (You can be sure that Afghans have a somewhat different perspective on the newsworthiness of that war.) We are also not going to spend our time searching for the names of people like Momina Bibi, whom we've. . oops . . . inadvertently annihilated while carrying out our nation's drone kill program.

For his part, Donald Trump has pledged to "take out" the families of terrorists, a plan that sounds practically ordinary when compared to our actual drone assassination program, conceived by President George W. Bush and maintained and expanded by President Obama. And while I don't for a moment pretend that Trump's electoral victory is anything less than an emergency for our republic especially for the most vulnerable among us, and for every American who believes in justice, equity, or basic kindness it's also true that some things won't change at all. In fact, it's prototypically American that an overlong and inward looking election spectacle (which will, incidentally, have "big league" international implications) will be supplanted by still more inward looking phenomena.

And it jogs my memory in a not very pleasant way. I can't help but recall the moment, years ago and 8,000 miles away, when I was introduced to my own American centered self. The experience left an ugly mark on my picture of who I am and who, perhaps, so many of us are, as Americans.

No, not us years before I heard about a guy in Yemen whose cousins were obliterated by an American drone strike in a procession following his wedding celebration, I gleefully clicked through the travel site Kayak and pressed "confirm purchase" on one way tickets to Kathmandu. It was 2008, shortly before Barack Obama would be elected, and my boyfriend and I, a couple of twenty somethings jonesing to see the world, were about to depart on what we expected to be the adventure of our lives. Having worked temporary stints and squirreled away some cash, we packed our belongings into my mom's damp basement and prepared ourselves for a journey meant to last half a year and cross South Asia and East Africa. What we didn't know, as we headed for New York's Kennedy Airport, our passports zippered into our money belts, was that, whatever we had left behind at my mom's, we were unwittingly carrying something far heftier with us: our American ness.

Adventures commenced as soon as we stepped off the plane. We glimpsed ice capped peaks that rose majestically out of the clouds as we walked the lower Everest trail. Then consider this our introduction to the presumptions we hadn't shed we ran into a little snafu. We hadn't brought along enough cash for our multi week mountain trek; apparently we'd expected Capital One ATMs to appear miraculously on a Himalayan footpath. After we dealt with that issue through a service that worked by landline and carbon paper, we took a bumpy Jeep ride south to India and soon found ourselves walking the sloping fields of Darjeeling, the hermes mens bracelet imitation leaves of tea shrubs glinting in the afternoon light. Then we rode trains west and south, while through the frame of a moving window I looked out at fields and rice paddies where women in red or orange or turquoise saris worked the land, even as the sun set and the sky turned pink and reflected off the water where the rice grew.

Things would, however, soon get significantly less picturesque, as in some strange, twisted way, the farther we traveled, the closer to home we seemed to get.

We arrived in Mombasa, Kenya, in January 2009, on a day when thousands of the city's residents had flooded its streets to protest a recent, and particularly bloody, Israeli attack H bracelet replica on Gaza. Hamas, firing rockets into southern Israel, had killed one Israeli and injured many others. Israel retaliated in an overwhelming fashion, filling the Gazan sky with aircraft and killing hundreds of Palestinians, including five girls from a single family, ages four to 17, who were unlucky enough to live in a refugee camp adjacent to a mosque that an Israeli plane had leveled.

As I hopped off the matatu, or passenger van, into the scorching Kenyan heat, I was aware that 50,000 angry protesters had gathered not so far away, and certain facts became clear to me. For one thing, the slaughter of hundreds of civilians, including several dozen children, in what was, to me, a faraway land, was a big effing deal here. That should probably go without saying just about anywhere except I was suddenly aware that, were I home, the opposite would have been true. Those deaths in distant Gaza (unlike nearby Israel) would barely have caused a blip in the American news. What's more, if I had been at home and the story had somehow caught my eye, I knew that I wouldn't have paid it much mind. Another war in a foreign country is what I would've thought, and that would have been that.

At that moment, though, I didn't dwell on the point, because let's be serious I was scared poopless. There was a huge, angry protest nearby and we'd just gotten word that the crowd was burning an American flag. The enraged people who had taken to the streets in Mombasa were decrying my country's role in the carnage and I was a skinny American with a backpack who'd arrived in the wrong city on the wrong day.

We got the hell out of there as soon as we could. Early the next morning we climbed aboard a rusty old bus bound for Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I felt a wave of relief once I'd settled into my seat. I was looking forward to a different country and a new vista.

That new vista, it turned out, materialized almost at once. Our bus was soon barreling along a rutted dirt road, the scenery whipping by the window in a distinctly less than picturesque fashion. In fact, it passed in such a blur that I realized we were going way too fast. We already knew that bus accidents were common here; we'd heard about a recent one in which all the passengers died.

When we hit what undoubtedly was a yawning pothole on that none too well kept road, the windows shook ominously and I thought: we could die. By then, my slick hands were gripping my shredded vinyl seat. I could practically feel the heat of the crash induced flames and had no trouble picturing our charred bodies in the wreckage of the bus. And then that other thought came to me, the one I wouldn't forget, the one, thousands of miles from home, that seemed to catch who I really was: No not us, we can't diewas what I said to myself, pressing my eyes shut. I meant, of course, my boyfriend and I; I meant, that is, we Americans.

It was then that I felt an electric zap, as the events of the previous day had just melded with the present dangers and forced me to see what I would have preferred to ignore: that there was an unsavory likeness between my outlook and the American credo that thousands had been protesting in Mombasa. Wecan't die, was my thought, as if we were somehow different as if these Africans on the bus with us could die, but not us. Clutching my torn bus seat, I was still afraid, but another sensation overwhelmed me. I felt like a colossal jerk.

Of course, as you know because you're reading this, we made it safely to Dar es Salaam that night. But I was changed.

Apologizing to Ourselves

I'd like to say that my egocentricity about which lives matter most is uncommon among my countrymen and women. But if you spool through the seven plus years since I rode that bus, you'll notice how that very same mindset has meant that Americans go wild with panic over lone wolf terror killings on our soil, but show scant concern when it comes to the White House directed, CIA run drone assassination campaigns across the world, and all the civilian casualties that are the bloody result. The dead innocents include members of a Yemeni family who were riding in a wedding procession when four missiles bore down on them, and imitation hermes gold bracelet Momina Bibi, that Pakistani grandmother who was tending to an okra patch as her grandchildren played nearby when a missile blasted her to smithereens. AC 130 gunship. Depending on which tally you use, since 2009 we've killed an estimated 474 civilians, or perhaps 745, outside of official war zones (and far more civilians, like those dead in that hospital, within those zones), although the horrifying truth is that the real numbers are likely much higher, but unknown and unknowable. civilians were identified in the vicinity. We value American life far too highly for such wantonness. In 2015, when a drone struck an al Qaeda compound in Pakistan, it was later discovered that two hostages, one of them an American, were inside. In response, President Obama delivered grave remarks: "I offer our deepest apologies to the families . . . I directed that this operation be declassified and disclosed . . . because the families deserve to know the truth."

But why so sorry that time and not with the other 474 or more deaths? Of course the difference was that innocent American blood was spilt. We don't even try to hide this dubious hierarchy; we celebrate it. In that same speech, President Obama reflected on why we Americans are so darn special. "One of the things that makes us exceptional," he declared, "is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes."

If you hailed from any other country, it might have seemed like an odd, not to say tasteless, time to wax poetic about American exceptionalism. The president was, after all, confessing that we'd accidentally fired missiles at two captive aid workers. But I can appreciate the sentiment. Inadequate though the apology was "There are hundreds, potentially thousands of others who deserve the same apology," said an investigator for Amnesty International he was at least admitting that the United States had erred, and he was pointing out that such admissions are important. Indeed, they are. It's just . . . what about the rest of the people on the planet?

The Trump administration will probably espouse a philosophy much like President Obama's when it comes to valuing (or not) the lives of foreign innocents. And yet there's part of me that must be as unworldly as that twenty something who flew into Kathmandu, because I find myself dreaming about a new brand of American exceptionalism in our future. Not one that gives you that icky feeling when you're riding a speeding bus in another hemisphere, nor one at whose heart lies the idea that we Americans are different and special and better which, history tells us, is actually a totally unexceptional notion among powerful nations. Instead, I imagine what would be truly Hermes Collier de Chien Bracelet replica exceptional: an America that values all human life in the same way.

Of course, I'm also a realist and I know that that's not the world we live in, especially now and that it won't be for, at best, a very long time.

Mattea Kramer, a TomDispatch regular, is at work on a memoir called The Young Person's Guide to Aging, which inspired this essay. Follow her onTwitter.
Aug 29 '17 · 0 comments
Queens Native Fran Drescher Returns to Home Borough to Raise Awareness for Cancer

A celebrity cancer survivor visits Queens to raise awareness for cancer screening.

Actress and Queens native Fran Drescher paid fake hermes H bracelet Black gold a visit to the Project Renewal Scan Van Monday, during its time at the Long Island City Community Healthcare Network (CHN). Drescher's cancer awareness organization, "Cancer Shmancer", is joining forces with the Scan Van to provide early detection services hermes jewelry replica for women Collier de Chien hermes bracelet copy of all incomes and fake hermes H bracelet backgrounds.

"The more we can encourage women of low income to get diagnosed early, the more that they can ensure their survival rate," Drescher, a uterine cancer survivor of 15 years, said.

"It's important that every woman gets their mammogram, gets it done to detect these things earlier," said participant Carol Wilkins of Ravenswood.

The ScanVan screens more than 5,000 women a year.

"A location that is familiar, comfortable, trusted like CHN Long Island City it becomes much easier for her to access her mammography," said Project Renewal's ScanVan Director, Mary Solomon.
Aug 29 '17 · 0 comments
Prognosis and prognostic research

Doctors have little specific research to draw on when predicting outcome. In this first article in a series Karel Moons and colleagues explain why research into prognosis is important and how to design such researchHippocrates included prognosis as a principal concept of medicine.1 Nevertheless, principles and methods of prognostic research have received limited attention, especially compared with therapeutic and aetiological research. This article is the first in a series of four aiming to provide an hermes replica bracelet accessible overview of these principles and methods. Our focus is on prognostic studies aimed at predicting outcomes from multiple variables rather than on studies investigating whether a single variable (such as a tumour or other biomarker) may be prognostic. Here we consider the principles of prognosis and multivariable prognostic studies and the reasons for and settings in which multivariable prognostic models are developed and used. The other articles in the series will focus on the development of multivariable prognostic models,2 their validation,3 and the application and impact of prognostic models in practice.4Summary points Prognosis is estimating the risk of future outcomes in individuals based on their clinical and non clinical characteristicsPredicting outcomes is not synonymous with explaining their causePrognostic studies require a multivariable approach to design and analysisThe best design to address prognostic questions is a cohort studyWhat is prognosis?Prognosis simply means foreseeing, predicting, or estimating the probability or risk of future conditions; familiar examples are weather and economic forecasts. In medicine, prognosis commonly relates to the probability or risk of an individual developing a particular state of health (an outcome) over a specific time, based on his or her clinical and non clinical profile. Outcomes are often specific events, such as death or complications, but they may also be quantities, such as disease progression, (changes in) pain, or quality of life.In medical textbooks, however, prognosis commonly refers to the expected course of an illness. This terminology is too general and has limited utility in practice. Doctors replica hermes brecelet clic h do not predict the course of an illness but the course of an illness in a particular individual. Prognosis may be shaped by a patient's age, sex, history, symptoms, signs, and other test results. Moreover, prognostication in medicine is not limited to those who are ill. Healthcare professionals, especially primary care doctors, regularly predict the future in healthy individuals for example, using the Apgar score to determine the prognosis of newborns, cardiovascular risk profiles to predict heart disease in the general population, and prenatal testing to assess the risk that a pregnant woman will give birth to a baby with Down's syndrome.Multivariable research Given hermes replica bracelets the variability among patients and in the aetiology, presentation, and treatment of diseases and other health states, a single predictor or variable rarely gives an adequate estimate of prognosis. Doctors implicitly or explicitly use multiple predictors to estimate a patient's prognosis. Prognostic studies therefore need to use a multivariable approach in design and analysis to determine the important predictors of the studied outcomes and to provide outcome probabilities for different combinations of predictors, or to provide tools to estimate such probabilities. These tools are commonly called prognostic models, prediction models, prediction rules, or risk scores.5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 They enable care providers to use combinations of predictor values to estimate an absolute risk or probability that an outcome will occur in an individual. A multivariable approach also enables researchers to investigate whether specific prognostic factors or markers that are, say, more invasive or costly to measure, have worthwhile added predictive value beyond cheap or simply obtained predictors for example, from patient history or physical examination. Nonetheless, many prognostic studies still consider a single rather than multiple predictors.15Use of prognostic modelsMedical prognostication and prognostic models are used in various settings and for various reasons. The main reasons are to inform individuals about the future course of their illness (or their risk of developing illness) and to guide doctors and patients in joint decisions on further treatment, if any. For example, modifications of the Framingham cardiovascular risk score16 are widely used in primary care to determine the indication for cholesterol lowering and antihypertensive drugs. Examples from secondary care include use of the Nottingham prognostic index to estimate the long term risk of cancer recurrence or death in breast cancer patients,17 the acute physiology and chronic health evaluation (APACHE) score and simplified acute physiology score (SAPS) to predict hospital mortality in critically ill patients,18 19 and models for predicting postoperative nausea and vomiting.20 21Another reason for prognostication and use of prognostic models is to select relevant patients for therapeutic research. For example, researchers used a previously validated prognostic model to select women with an increased risk of developing cancer for a randomised trial of tamoxifen to prevent breast cancer.22 Another randomised trial on the efficacy of radiotherapy after breast conserving resection used a prognostic model to select patients with a low risk of cancer recurrence.23Prognostic models are also used to compare differences in performance between hospitals. For example, the clinical risk index for babies (CRIB) was originally developed to compare performance and mortality among neonatal intensive care units.24 More recently Jarman et al developed a model to predict the hospital standardised mortality ratio to explain differences between English hospitals.25Differences from aetiological researchAlthough there are clear similarities in the design and analysis of prognostic and aetiological studies, predicting outcomes is not synonymous with explaining their cause.26 27 In aetiological research, the mission is to explain whether an outcome can reliably be attributed to a particular risk factor, with adjustment for other causal factors (confounders) using a multivariable approach. In prognostic research the mission is to use multiple variables to predict, as accurately as possible, the risk of future outcomes. Although a prognostic model may be used to provide insight into causality or pathophysiology of the studied outcome, that is neither an aim nor a requirement. All variables potentially associated with the outcome, not necessarily causally, can be considered in a prognostic study. Every causal factor is a predictor albeit sometimes a weak one but not every predictor is a cause. Nice examples of predictive but non causal factors used in everyday practice are skin colour in the Apgar score and tumour markers as predictors of cancer progression or recurrence. Both are surrogates for obvious causal factors that are more difficult to measure.Furthermore, to guide prognostication in individuals, analysis and reporting of prognostic studies should focus on absolute risk estimates of outcomes given combinations of predictor values. Relative risk estimates (eg odds ratio, risk ratio, or hazard ratio) have no direct meaning or relevance to prognostication in practice. In prediction research, relative risks are used only to obtain an absolute probability of the outcome for an individual, as we will show in our second article.2 In contrast, aetiological and therapeutic studies commonly focus on relative risks for example, the risk of an outcome in presence of a causal factor relative to the risk in its absence. Also, the calibration and discrimination of a multivariable model are highly relevant to prognostic research but meaningless in aetiological research.How to study prognosis?Building on previous guidelines8 10 14 28 29 we distinguish three major steps in multivariable prognostic research that are also followed in the other articles in this series2 3 4: developing the prognostic model, validating its performance in new patients, and studying its clinical impact (box). We focus here on the non statistical characteristics of a multivariable study aimed at developing a prognostic model. The statistical aspects of developing a model are covered in our second article.2Validation studies Validating or testing the model's predictive performance (eg, calibration and discrimination) in new participants. This can be narrow (in participants from the same institution measured in the same manner by the same researchers though at a later time, or in another single institution by different researchers using perhaps slightly different definitions and data collection methods) or broad (participants obtained from various other institutions or using wider inclusion criteria)3 4Impact studies Quantifying whether the use of a prognostic model by practising doctors truly improves their decision making and ultimately patient outcome, which can again be done narrowly or broadly.4ObjectiveThe main objective of a prognostic study is to determine the probability of the specified outcome with different combinations of predictors in a well defined population.Study sampleThe study sample includes people at risk of developing the outcome of interest, defined by the presence of a particular condition (for example, an illness, undergoing surgery, copy hermes clic h bracelet or being pregnant).Study designThe best design to answer prognostic questions is a cohort study. A prospective study is preferable as it enables optimal measurement of predictors and outcome (see below). Studies using cohorts already assembled for other reasons allow longer follow up times but usually at the expense of poorer data. Unfortunately, the prognostic literature is dominated by retrospective studies. Case control studies are sometimes used for prognostic analysis, but they do not automatically allow estimation of absolute risks because cases and controls are often sampled from a source population of unknown size. Since investigators are free to choose the ratio of cases and controls, the absolute outcome risks can be manipulated.30 An exception is a case control study nested in a cohort of known size.31Data from randomised trials of treatment can also be used to study prognosis. When the treatment is ineffective (relative risk=1.0), the intervention and comparison group can simply be combined to study baseline prognosis. If the treatment is effective the groups can be combined, but the treatment variable should then be included as a separate predictor in the multivariable model. Here treatments are studied on their independent predictive effect and not on their therapeutic or preventive effects. However, prognostic models obtained from randomised trial data may have restricted generalisability because of strict eligibility criteria for the trial, low recruitment levels, or large numbers refusing consent.PredictorsCandidate predictors can be obtained from patient demographics, clinical history, physical examination, disease characteristics, test results, and previous treatment. Prognostic studies may focus on a cohort of patients who have not (yet) received prognosis modifying treatments that is, to study the natural course or baseline prognosis of patients with that condition. They can also examine predictors of prognosis in patients who have received treatments.Studied predictors should be clearly defined, standardised, and reproducible to enhance generalisability and application of study results to practice.32 Predictors requiring subjective interpretation, such as imaging test results, are of particular concern in this context because there is a risk of studying the predictive ability of the observer rather than that of the predictors. Also, predictors should be measured using methods applicable or potentially applicable to daily practice. Specialised measurement techniques may yield optimistic predictions.As discussed above, the prognostic value of treatments can also be studied, especially when randomised trials are used. However, caution is needed in including treatments as prognostic factors when data are observational. Indications for treatment and treatment administration are often not standardised in observational studies and confounding by indication could lead to bias and large variation in the (type of) administered treatments.33 Moreover, in many circumstances the predictive effect of treatments is small compared with that of other important prognostic variables such as age, sex, and disease stage.Finally, of course, studies should include only predictors that will be available at the time when the model is intended to be used.34 If the aim is to predict a patient's prognosis at the time of diagnosis, for example, predictors that will not be known until actual treatment has started are of little value.OutcomePreferably, prognostic studies should focus on outcomes that are relevant to patients, such as occurrence or remission of disease, death, complications, tumour growth, pain, treatment response, or quality of life. Surrogate or intermediate outcomes, such as hospital stay or physiological measurements, are unhelpful unless they have a clear causal relation to relevant patient outcomes, such as CD4 counts instead of development of AIDS or death in HIV studies. The period over which the outcome is studied and the methods of measurement should be clearly defined. Finally, outcomes should be measured without knowledge of the predictors under study to prevent bias, particularly if measurement requires observer interpretation. Blinding is not necessary when the outcome is all cause mortality. But if the outcome is cause specific mortality, knowledge of the predictors might influence assessment of outcomes (and vice versa in retrospective studies where predictors are documented after the outcome was assessed).Required number of patientsThe multivariable character of prognostic research makes it difficult to estimate the required sample size. There are no straightforward methods for this. When the number of predictors is much larger than the number of outcome events, there is a risk of overestimating the predictive performance of the model. Ideally, prognostic studies require at least several hundred outcome events. Various studies have suggested that for each candidate predictor studied at least 10 events are required,6 8 35 36 although a recent study showed that this number could be lower in certain circumstances.37
Aug 29 '17 · 0 comments
Pipeline foes set up new camp at Kinder Morgan terminal in Burnaby

Van Hardeveld, who was part of the original Kinder Morgan protests on Burnaby Mountain, said people have been at the new camp 24 hours a day for a couple of weeks.

Their large tent is stocked with food and bedding and has crudely fashioned windows with views of the Burrard Inlet. The campers have mostly observed tankers filling up at the terminal and workers driving to the site.

Van Hardeveld is opposed to the pipeline project because he's concerned about climate change. The campers say they will stay till Kinder Morgan drops its plan to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline, which the National Energy Board is currently reviewing.

"It's a concern because it's continuing a path we can't continue as a species," hermes h bracelets fake he said. hermes bracelets replica "Fossil fuel extraction is not compatible with our lives."

The tent is set up just outside the Kinder Morgan property line, on the grass beside Bayview Drive.

Meanwhile, the camp on Centennial Way is mostly gone apart from a pile of a few leftover items. City staff removed truckloads of trash following the 10 day standoff with police and Kinder Morgan crews in late November.

"We have done a replica hermes bracelets lot of cleanup in the area, we've been in with our crews picking up hermes bracelet fake any sort of debris and stuff in the area," said Don Hunter, assistant director of the city's parks and recreation department.
Aug 29 '17 · 0 comments
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