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Peter Baum is looking forward to becoming a weekend warrior for the Ohio Machine, a Major League Lacrosse team which plays out of Delaware.
Like many of his teammates, the Colgate University graduate lives out of town but will join his fellow cogs in the Machine every weekend for games.
“Yeah it’ll be pretty different,” says Baum, the 2012 Tewaaraton Trophy winner for the Raiders and the top pick in the 2013 MLL Collegiate Draft for the Ohio Machine. “It’ll be different to build a sense of chemistry when you are only playing together once or twice a week.
“At the same time, the guys who are playing in this league are playing at such a high level. They understand how to play a sport, not just from the physical standpoint but from the mental side. It makes things easier to jell once we get playing.”
President and General Manager John Algie will count on Baum and a host of new talent to help the Machine improve on their second consecutive 212 finish in their twoyear history.
The Machine finished behind Denver (140), Chesapeake (95), Hamilton (95), Charlotte (77), Rochester (68), Boston (59) and New York (410) in the regular season.
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As the death toll continues to ascend, now reaching over 140,000, Syria has entered its fourth year of war on a high stakes battleground. The distinction between the war’s dynamic three years ago and today, however, is stark.
A once largely unified rebel faction has been reduced to infighting amongst radical Islamist forces and secular moderate elements. Whereas moderate tone and language initially defined the opposition in Syria, Islamist groups from neighboring countries seized the opportunity to implant their influence in the region. These groups then began to join rebel forces, offering supplies and strategy. After all, several of the Islamist fringe groups had already been involved in guerilla-style warfare in places like Iraq.
Yet original members of the opposition cause, who also value the overthrow of Bashar Assad, part company with extremists when it comes to the system of government they prefer after Assad is removed. Fighting between rebel coalitions has thus become commonplace. Of all the potential setbacks for Bashar Assad, he has not had to worry about a unified opposition.
Among other advantages for Assad belongs a steady flow of aid from Russia and Iran.
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OKCupid members arriving at the site via a Firefox browser today are being asked to make a choice and stand up against anti-gay bigotry. At the center of the controversy is Firefox's new CEO, Brendan Eich, who donated money in support of California Prop 8 back in 2008.
Visitors to the site browsing with Firefox received a special message from OKCupid stating, “Hello there, Mozilla Firefox user. Pardon this interruption of your OkCupid experience. Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.”
Visitors were then offered redirect tabs to download alternatives to the Mozilla Firefox web browser. The move is a bold piece of activism in a tech industry becoming more willing to flex its political muscle.
The Prop 8 ballot measure instituted a statewide ban on gay marriage in California after winning at the polls with the help of large donations from the right wing. It temporarily redefined marriage in California as specifically a union between a man and a woman.
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Recently Facebook has been on a media offensive. They have been touting their March 28 purchase of experimental Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV, called drones) manufacturer Ascenta. Ascenta has built a solar-powered extreme endurance drone that can remain aloft at high altitude for years. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees this as the key to his dream of expanding internet access in the developing world. Facebook's planned deployment of drone-based internet will compete directly with Google's planned use of high altitude balloons to expand rural connectivity in the developing world in what it calls Project Loon. Both projects have the leave the door wide open to the surveillance state in ways that neither advertise. Ascenta's connections to the defense industry are well documented.
Facebook's plan is to have Ascenta's drones constantly circle an area at an altitude above 65,000 feet. This altitude would keep the lingering UAVs out of the way of both commercial air traffic and harmful weather. From that altitude the drones would provide a point of internet connectivity for cellular and wireless devices either directly, or via line of sight base stations.
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Paramount has finally released a full trailer for the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, and the internet just wouldn’t be the internet if everybody wasn’t up in arms over it. But along with the cries of RUINED FOREVER there are a lot of seriously legitimate concerns about the latest take on TMNT.
Many of them are relevant to the current state of paintbynumber Hollywood blockbusters as a whole. The first seriously relevant issue: Whitewashing, aka a character who is explicitly supposed to be a person of color being changed into a white person. In this case, iconic villain The Shredder, who is Japanese (or, in one version, an alien posing as Japanese), is played by notatallAsian William Fichtner. Fichtner is a great actor, and he puts on a good show in the trailer, but there are plenty of Japanese actors who could have played that role just as well. The only reason the turtles were ninjas at all was because they were raised by a Japanese immigrant who practiced martial arts, and being steeped in that culture is a significant part of the story. Is Fichtner’s Shredder some white otaku?
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Pol Pot's daughter, who at age 10 saw her father's bloated corpse in a Cambodian jungle in 1998, has married her university sweetheart in a ceremony overshadowed by the late Khmer Rouge leader's murderous regime. Sar Patchata, 26, is the only child of Pol Pot, whose real name was Saloth Sar. Pol Pot's fanatic mix of Maoist and Stalinist communism and rush to create a rural-based society with "new people" starting at the "year zero," resulted in nearly two million Cambodian deaths from executions, torture, slavery, starvation, and disease. Ms. Sar earned her master's degree in English literature in Malaysia where, a few years ago, she met Sy Vicheka. The two Cambodians married in Kbal Spean village, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold in northwest Cambodia's Banteay Meanchey province near Thailand's border. About 50 guests attended the two-day ceremony which began on March 15, according to Cambodian media. On March 16, the couple was blessed by four Buddhist monks and reportedly received cash, gold and other gifts worth thousands of dollars.
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BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thailand's U.S.-trained military has a new enemy and is now hunting northern separatists who want to seize most of this Buddhist-majority country, create a Lanna People's Democratic Republic, and expel Bangkok to a shrunken South Thailand. The military is warning Thais not to demand independence in the north because such "treason" and "sedition" could spark a bloody civil war. "Separatism is a severe offense," said army deputy spokesman Col. Winthai Suwaree. "Expressing differences in opinion is permitted under the constitution, but expressing the need to separate the country is not," Col. Winthai said. "The separation talk is especially shocking because, for the first time, the idea the country can be physically hacked up...along the political fault lines has been openly discussed," said Atiya Achakulwisut, a Bangkok Post editor. Caretaker Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, stung by allegations that she sympathized with the separatists, said on March 3, "We want to see Thailand as one and indivisible." Hoping to distance her government from the separatist issue, Ms. Yingluck met leaders of the armed forces on March 4 in her capacity as defense minister.
A wave of action is coming on April 4th, the date they killed MLK, the date Cindy Sheehan lost her son, the date cherry blossoms and resisters to fascism begin to show after an endless winter of many, many years. Take a look at https://waveofaction.org
Electing a different president six years ago was not a partial step, a failed attempt, a warm-up round. It was a halftime show of circus clowns and cheerleaders. The partial step, the failed attempt, the warm up, the ground work, the base of experience and training and testing was Occupy.
And what's happened since? We've learned more about how close Occupy came to shifting the balance. We've learned more about how scared the bankers and the warmongers and their servants in the unconstitutional police-state acronym crowd were (the FBI-DHS-CIA-NSA-SOBs). We've learned about the plans in Houston to murder Occupiers. We've learned about the infiltration, the instigation, the expropriation. We've looked back at the counterproductive results of tolerating a bit of violence on the side of justice and peace. We've marveled at the mistake of calling violence inclusiveness and tolerance.
Oh lethal, ticklish topic. So many people love guns and swear by them — many of them people with whom I am otherwise in essential political agreement. And it’s not like I relish a debate about “gun control,” a tug-of-war about limits that offends most gun lovers and causes weapon-buying sprees after every mass murder.
But the topic is unavoidable. The gun industry is part of the military-industrial complex and its advertising war aimed at the American reptile brain is centered around a permanent state of fear and, even more significantly, helplessness. Most people, or at least most gun owners, think “disarmed” means “disempowered” and the debate, such as it is, ends there.
The quote above is from an extraordinary essay by poet Judy Juanita, which gets at the spiritual dimension of the matter:
“The Gun as steel metaphor carrying the human urge to dominate and lay waste to an enemy or perceived threat. Guns as import and export. Hollywood’s Gun, its cinematic ordnance, is the United States’ international calling card.
“The Gun is oh-so-social as it erases human inequality. Anyone can obtain one and point . . . shoot . . .
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Anyone who cares about our natural environment should be marking with great sadness the centenary of World War I. Beyond the incredible destruction in European battlefields, the intense harvesting of forests, and the new focus on the fossil fuels of the Middle East, the Great War was the Chemists' War. Poison gas became a weapon -- one that would be used against many forms of life.
Insecticides were developed alongside nerve gases and from byproducts of explosives. World War II -- the sequel made almost inevitable by the manner of ending the first one -- produced, among other things, nuclear bombs, DDT, and a common language for discussing both -- not to mention airplanes for delivering both.
War propagandists made killing easier by depicting foreign people as bugs. Insecticide marketers made buying their poisons patriotic by using war language to describe the "annihilation" of "invading" insects (never mind who was actually here first). DDT was made available for public purchase five days before the U.S. dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.