I have received many a question about details of the game and this video will help shed a bit more light. We will communicate all of the remaining points of our vision shortly after we start production next week and after we have spent more time on the forums. We want to get fan feedback on a few more items before we solidify our final vision document.

I did want to give some detail on what the definition of a party based game was since there seems to be some confusion. In specific terms you will be creating and customizing four Rangers at the start of the game and typically you would give each of them different skills to create experts in certain fields. Skills in Wasteland range from lock-picking to bomb disarming to even toaster repair. This creates the dynamic of having players taking very different approaches to exploring the world. In addition there will be three slots for non-player characters to join the party. They will be similar in most respects to a player created member except you will not have 100% control over them. They will have quirks that could range from momentary indecision with them not firing their weapons at an opportune time, to being trigger happy and wasting ammo or even stealing from your characters. This opens up a wide range of possibilities on which NPCs you decide to have join your ranks.

And while we have brought Obsidian into the mix, I think it is important to note that this is my baby, and I will be producing it and managing the programming here at inXile. There seemed to be some confusion on whether it will be a joint production, but the main facets of our involvement are with the use of their tools for asset integration and the design talents of Chris Avellone. Part of the charm and variety of Wasteland 1 came from the way different designers would approach their areas, and I wanted the same dynamic again. Only this time we have added the brains of Chris into the mix, and I am betting he will add ideas to Wasteland 2 that would have never been in the game otherwise.

Due to popular demand, we have added a backer only T-shirt to the rewards. Here is a preview of what a few of the shirts will look like.

I hope you find the video useful. We are now in the final stretch....


ST. GEORGE — Saturday night, police officers were notified that at dusk a 17-year-old boy had run from a youth wilderness program’s campsite in a rugged, uninhabited area of desert backcountry close to an area known as Jackson Springs near the Gunlock Reservoir. On the way to search for the boy, a member of the Washington County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue team lost control of his Jeep on the unpaved Motaqua Road, causing the vehicle to roll. The SAR member was hospitalized and later found to have a concussion, while the search resumed for the boy.

In the dark, rescue teams, some in all-terrain vehicles others on-foot, dispersed throughout the backcountry near Jackson Springs and Pachoon Flats. The boy was said to not have a flashlight or food, and only a small amount of water.

About 15 of the 70 SAR members in Washington County helped search for the boy, Washington County Sheriff’s Deputy Darell Cashin, who manages the SAR team, said. All of the SAR members on Cashin’s team are nonpaid volunteers, and the majority of them use their own equipment, vehicles, and in this case, tracking dogs during rescues.

In this instance, the Jeep that rolled was a personal vehicle of the SAR member who was driving it toward the lost boy. The visibility on the dirt road was poor because of dust from the convoy of SAR vehicles, Cashin said. Cashin was following two cars behind the Jeep on a dirt road and saw the Jeep roll.

“He came around this corner and just washboarded and turned his Jeep,” Cashin said, “flipped onto his side and knocked him out.”

He had no broken bones and there was no bleeding, but the SAR member sustained a concussion and was transported by ambulance to the Dixie Regional Medical Center, Cashin said. He was checked out at the hospital and later cleared to leave.

While their team member was hospitalized, the rest of the SAR team arrived at the campsite from where the boy ran and began the search. Most of the team spread out in Jeeps or ATVs, looking for the boy.

One team that was on foot caught the boy’s scent with help from a tracking dog. With help from the K-9, they followed the boy’s scent and found his footsteps for a time but lost both his steps and his scent once they came upon a road. For the next five-six hours the SAR teams continued looking for the boy as the night turned to early morning.

At approximately 2 a.m. the teams were notified that the boy had been located. “He ran out of what little water he had and was wandering around in the desert,” Cashin said.

The boy had walked into a nearby camp, cold, hungry and thirsty and the person who was camping there drove to an area with cell phone service and let the police know that he had the boy. The camper then turned the boy over to a Washington County Sheriff’s Deputy who turned him back over to the wilderness program. The boy was checked out by medical personnel and, although cold and thirsty, he had no other reported medical problems. The boy’s mother, who lives in Maryland, was also notified, Cashin said.

As far as the SAR member with the concussion, he shouldn’t have to pay for any medical bills, Cashin said. Although the rescuers are unpaid, they are covered by the Worker’s Compensation Fund.

“These guys risk themselves every time we go out,” Cashin said. “I don’t want to place blame … it was just a bad situation last night.”

This late night search capped a significantly busy three days for Washington County’s Search and Rescue teams. It’s fairly typical for SAR to have only one rescue every week or two, Cashin said. But the last three days, SAR has had four searches.

Thursday afternoon, SAR assisted in rescuing a mountain biker who ended up Life Flighted to the hospital; Friday, for about five hours, 25 SAR members searched the Arizona Strip for a suicidal man, and Saturday, not only did they search for the runaway teen, SAR also assisted 10 mountain bikers who were lost in the dark in the Red Cliffs Reserve.

Out of all these incidents, everybody returned safely and no one else got hurt, Cashin said. “And that’s all that matters … things can be fixed but people can’t.

“I cannot say enough about these (Search and Rescue) guys.”

The SAR members work for free and many of them take time off from work to go search, Cashin said. They pay for their own training, and they use mostly their own equipment that they pay for themselves.

“With as many people as we have using all these beautiful recreational areas … they save the citizens of the county so much,” Cashin said. “For these guys to take time off of work and come out there, I’m just so thankful for them.”

That being said, Cashin does everything he can to help the team with the resources he has. Although SAR does get an operational budget each year from Washington County, SAR relies mostly on donations and charity from the community. The operational budget pays for things like fuel, food, water, and sometimes repairs on equipment.

Anyone interested in donating funds or support can do so at the Washington County Sheriff’s office. A donation fund is available and money can be designated to the Search and Rescue.

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Email: dallred@stgnews.com

Twitter: @STGnews

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2014, all rights reserved.


As a “vertically integrated digital media company,” the investment fund known as the New Republic still produces dead-tree editions to keep up appearances. Once the flagship magazine of American liberals — the white ones, anyway — it also must keep up appearances in an ideological sense despite the billionaire CEO Chris Hughes, the spouse of a failed Democratic congressional candidate, taking the company in a more capitalistic direction. For example, the cover story in this month’s issue is a tissue of misrepresentations by a self-styled Christian socialist about conservative and traditional Catholics.

In a long and highly personal essay, staff writer Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig chastises critics of Pope Francis for raising doubts about some of his policy prescriptions and his alleged desire to “bring the Church into the modern age.” She writes:

Pope Francis approaches the past with dialogue, not mere deference, in mind. He knows that the only useful approach to the past is to recognize it as a work in progress. This has the effect of imbuing accumulated tradition with no special authority over current conclusions. … From that alone conservatively disposed Catholics might flinch.

The piece has come under criticism from some Catholic writers who see her as misunderstanding the papacy, which, as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI put it, “is bound to the Tradition of faith … it is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition,” rather than a kind of absolute monarchy. The people Bruenig aims her polemic at are the ones who think, when approaching the past with “dialogue, not mere deference, in mind,” one should still keep in mind that it’s louder than we are.

The piece doesn’t get much deeper than quoting a few policy-based objections to statements of Francis’s and implying the ones who said them are vaguely disloyal and full of “fear.” This in itself is a bit misleading; the right-leaning journal Crisis ran a piece just recently counseling conservatives to calm down, so the idea that they’re all of a mind with Sean Hannity on this is arrant nonsense.

“In [Bruenig’s] mind, it’s not possible for conservative and traditional Catholics to have mindful reservations about Francis; they are acting out of emotionally driven animus,” wrote Gabriel Sanchez at the blog Opus Publicum.

“In the worldview of Bruenig, the pope can do anything,” said Dr. Adam DeVille in the Catholic World Report this week, adding that her sense of “papal maximalism … and this cult of personality surrounding the papal office are un-traditional, un-historical, un-theological, un-ecumenical, and unhealthy.”

Both writers take Bruenig to task for describing the pope as “the world’s most renowned Christian theological guide.” It’s a point of view that causes Church history to collapse into absurdity; one could say Saint Paul should have kept his mouth shut about the “workable synthesis” of Mosaic law and the Gospel instead of confronting Saint Peter at Antioch.

Damon Linker argued earlier this week at The Week that “the pope isn’t a radical at all; that if I’m wrong and he actually is a radical, then conservatives are perfectly capable of and justified in criticizing him.”

Indeed, none of this is necessarily to the point if Francis isn’t a “radical pope.” On that, Bruenig tries to have it both ways, noting (truthfully) that he has presided over no substantial changes so far. Yet to argue that nothing has changed, but also say Francis seems to have a taste for it and anyway change is good, is a bit too clever, suggesting something about the priorities of the author.

How does she know the Church is ready for a radical pope? Or that Francis is one? Or that such a pope would be a good thing to have? Graduate school, obviously. Much of the cover story — three separate sections — is devoted to Stoker Bruenig’s intellectual development at Cambridge under the tutelage of Fr. John Hughes, a proponent of a school of thought known as “radical orthodoxy,” a program of using Christian principles to critique modernity in ways that are often hostile to capitalism (a school which, for the record, I happen to have a lot of sympathy for). Fr. Hughes passed away in a tragic car accident last year.

He is referred to as a priest twice, and as Father John twice, which, in a piece about the pope, would give you the impression that he was a Catholic priest, wouldn’t it?

Well, he wasn’t, he was an Anglican priest, and that isn’t mentioned anywhere in their cover story. This should not have gotten past their fact checkers, if Chris Hughes has bothered to keep any on. I was not the only one who read the piece and got the impression Fr. Hughes was Catholic, which shows a note of clarification is needed.

(He sounds like a wonderful teacher, and I’m sure his thoughts on Catholic theology were insightful; I don’t mean to gainsay that at all. But facts are important.)

I pointed this out on Twitter last Monday night, and a week later it still hasn’t been fixed, so obviously Stoker Bruenig and the New Republic’s editorial staff don’t agree. When I first pointed it out, Bruenig began to dissemble, tossing out an ad hominem about being criticized by an “ensemble of white males.” Apparently it is to “be a jerk about a well beloved deceased priest” if you suggest it’s relevant what kind of priest he was. She also said she “presumed people would know Cambridge = CofE.”

For an advocate of the poor, this sure assumes a lot of knowledge about how Cambridge works.

At this point it’s safe to assume that the New Republic doesn’t view the distinction between Anglicanism and Catholicism as significant enough to be worth noting in a cover story about the pope. They both have bishops and stuff, what’s the difference?

The bigger question is whether this elision is related to bigger issues in the piece, some of which have been pointed out by others. I submit that it is. Like the way Bruenig describes tradition, which is far more akin to the “threefold cord” of Anglicanism:

The present and the past must speak as equals, as both are works of human effort. … Francis’s handling of tradition and modernity privileges neither, but rather produces a workable synthesis of their contributions.

If this is true, then, pace Linker, there is indeed cause for concern, because it isn’t really the pope’s job to produce “a workable synthesis” of modernity and tradition. The pope isn’t a glorified Archbishop of Canterbury. **The analogy is even more apt because in Bruenig’s understanding of this modern synthesis, in lieu of deferring to the past or sacred tradition, the Church defers to the secular state. More on that later.

Whether or not Francis is interested in changing the Church’s teaching on things like homosexuality and communion for divorcees is, again, debatable, but there are reasons to believe other clergy are, because they’ve said so. Stoker Bruenig doesn’t even bother to mention them, a fact New York Times columnist Ross Douthat pointed out on Twitter:

@yeselson @ebruenig It's a lovely essay that only lacks for a rebuttal to the theological arguments in question 🙂 — Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) March 9, 2015

@yeselson @ebruenig And if Elizabeth thinks reforms being proposed by Walter Kasper are theologically sound, I want to read *that* case. — Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) March 9, 2015

Douthat alludes to a number of German ecclesiastics who are prepared to tweak the Church’s teaching in various ways, even threatening to go their own way if they don’t get what they want. The head of the German bishops conference even suggested young people who want “to be clear in their positions” have embarked on “the beginning of terrorism,” using rhetoric that is, frankly, similar to Stoker Bruenig’s.

She even quotes Cardinal Kasper for support of Francis’s alleged radicalism; he says the pontiff “does not represent a liberal position, but a radical position, understood in the original sense of the word as going back to the roots, the radix.”

What Kasper proposes amounts to a break with tradition; if we are leaves or twigs, to cut off our branches to return to the roots entails dismemberment and decomposition. But we’ll get to that later. Suffice it to say that this concept is very enamoring for those looking for a precedent for their radicalism. The popularizer of the #fullcommunism meme likes it too:

The joke’s on them, since white nationalists have already staked a claim on that bit of nomenclatural topography. Radix Journal exists, and they wouldn’t like it.

This is an excellent place to bring up how the liberalizers’ commitment to diversity quickly turns to condescension the moment minorities don’t play the roles that have been appointed for them. Last year Cardinal Kasper caused a minor scandal when he said the views of African prelates on homosexuality were informed by a cultural “taboo,” and that “they should not tell us too much what we have to do.”

You see this attitude in a secular context in the progressive attitude toward blacks who voted overwhelmingly for traditional marriage in Alabama; their votes don’t matter because a wealthy, largely white alternative-sexualities lobby has decided to use federal courts to overrule them. They shouldn’t tell us too much what to do, after all. And they definitely shouldn’t get to decide for themselves.

Acting racist toward more tradition-minded clerics from the Third World is a recurring motif among liberalizers, especially in the Anglican Communion. Archbishop of York John Sentamu has been the recipient of a fair amount, and he’s not even all that much of a traditionalist, he just thinks they should be accommodated. In 1998, Bishop John Spong of Newark, who worked to build an “atheistic” Christianity, famously said that, “Scientific advances have given us a new way of understanding homosexual people. At the Lambeth Conference and in dealing with the Third World this knowledge hasn’t percolated down.”

Most of the people Bruenig criticizes are white. But there’s a certain similarity between these criticisms of African clergy and the suggestion that American conservatives and traditionalists are nothing but fearful and superstitious.

Her comments on liturgical traditionalists are even worse. There is a much-acclaimed shift among the Millennial generation back to more high-church forms of worship, including historic liturgies, and away from the amorphous ones of both our mainline Boomer parents and rock band evangelicals. It seems pretty uncharitable to look at one of these people, casting about for a style of worship that reflects the grandeur of God, and then tell them that that want to recover old forms is to “relate to the past in a wholly modern way” and then compare them to “those who ignored climate change.”

Even if there’s some merit to this line of argument, it applies more to progressive Episcopalians than Latin Mass Catholics. For example, Jonathan Merritt recently wrote about Rachel Held Evans, a young writer whose “thinking has become increasingly progressive — especially on hot button theological issues such as gender and sexuality. This shift culminated in her leaving evangelicalism for Episcopalianism.”

Generally speaking, I think the trend toward high-church worship is a wonderful thing, but it’s important that it express a commitment to catholicity rather than a kind of cultural elitism. It would be a real shame for all this energy to be directed into a body that has badly neglected its responsibilities to the Body of Christ. The Episcopal Church’s heterodoxy on gay issues has put the entire Anglican Communion in a state of flux — maybe Bruenig would call it “dialogue” — with the Lambeth Conference indefinitely postponed. For any but the most devout practitioner of the progressive religion that price is much too high. Evans goes on to offer a self-righteous gloss on the decline of mainline churches everywhere; that the church needs to die to be reborn; “Lately I’ve been wondering if a little death and resurrection is exactly what the American church needs. What if all this talk of waning numbers and shrinking influence means our empire-building days are over and it’s a good thing?”

That seems like wishful thinking wrapped up in a misguided analogy to me; supposing the Church regularly reincarnates itself is incompatible with the idea of an apostolic faith and Christ’s promise to be with us until the end of the age. But almost more striking is the fatalistic kind of progressive amor fati; progressive unto death.

As a former Anglican, it baffles me that this is a road smart people like Cardinal Kasper seem to want to go down. It leads to confusion, isolation, and as some of the more honest progressives admit, death.

The Church is not an empire either, and God-willing, that temptation will be resisted. The Anglican tradition has a long and sordid history of pseudo-Erastianism, which continues today in the Episcopal Church’s advocacy for Obamacare, and Gene Robinson and an Episcopal health ministry official getting cushy fellowships at the Center for American Progress. The WASPs may be gone, but the Episcopal Church’s empire-building days ain’t over. Indeed, you could say the corollary to thinking the Church is an empire is a deference to the state as an agent of liberation, which brings us back to Bruenig, who has written:

“A stateless response to poverty has not been part of Christian tradition for some time, and to address poverty without implicating politics at this point in history would be nearly impossible.”

And this:

“If the state is here to recognize and protect property rights, then the state must recognize that the excess of the wealthy quite literally is the property of the poor, and act accordingly. Just as the state would work to retrieve a stolen article, it must retrieve the hoarded wealth being stolen from the poor, and deliver it to them.”

These are interesting statements. The remarkable thing about Stoker Bruenig’s point of view, in comparison to her mentor’s, is its lack of radicalism or orthodoxy, more akin to a social gospeler than Moses Coady. There’s practically nothing about it that wouldn’t be at home in the Democratic National Committee. There is no sense of scale or subsidiarity in Bruenig’s political thinking, as if the government that can supposedly end poverty isn’t the same one that aspired to make the world safe for democracy or established an unlimited right to abortion. This also gives short shrift to the Church itself as a force of social transformation.

This program has a kulak to go with it; the conservatives and traditionalists she gestures at in the piece while quoting Sean Hannity. In the Episcopal Church, this scapegoating has taken the form of a program of state-sponsored confiscation by lawsuit — right up Stoker Bruenig’s alley — of parish buildings belonging to conservative congregations that voted, sometimes overwhelmingly, to depart from the ever-more-battily-progressive Episcopal Church.

There’s a lesson here, that the left doesn’t extend the same latitude it asks for when out of power. The legal standard privileging congregational self-determination with respect to church buildings was established in the famous King’s Chapel case in 1787, when the first American Anglican bishop Samuel Seabury — consecrated by non-juring Scottish bishops — refused to ordain the new rector of a Boston church, a Harvard man (of course) because of his turn to Unitarian theology. So they went their own way. Today, the Episcopal Church still fights for nearly every church building, but the dissenters are on the right, not the left.

This is an Episcopalian dispute — not that it matters to the New Republic — but the Catholic parallel is a kind of liberal clericalism that has arguably been emboldened under Francis’s papacy, of which Bruenig’s piece is a good representative. Just recently, the CEO of the Toronto-based Salt and Light Media Foundation and Television Network, Rev. Thomas Rosica, threatened to sue a traditionalist Catholic blogger. After becoming something of a cause célèbre in the blogosphere Rosica called it off, evidently unable to “dialogue” his way out of St. Paul’s admonition about suing other Christians in secular courts.

One could say the Church of England was built on an alliance between liberal theology and a secular state, and that’s worked out relatively well for them, to be honest. But it was maintained with substantial violence, and today it is not much healthier than its trans-priest-inclusive American offshoot. That’s why I’m not as enthusiastic as Stoker Bruenig about this:

Consider … [Pope Francis’s] remarks on financial inequality, in which he called for a “legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the state, as well as indispensable cooperation between the private sector and civil society.” Pundits like Fox News host Sean Hannity erupted into paroxysms of anxiety, speculating that the Pope had some newfangled socialist schema in mind. Meanwhile, conservative leaders such as Catholic League President Bill Donohue offered only a lukewarm defense of their pontiff, deflecting outrage by arguing that Francis’s remarks were not really as radical as they seemed.

Pope Francis made the comments in question to the United Nations last May, and the phrase “called for” does a little too much work here; he just said it had a role to play in “equitable development.” But it wasn’t just Hannity and Bill Donohue who were concerned by them. Legendary blogger Fr. John Zuhlsdorf wondered, “When has any ‘State’ done this effectively? And what does ‘legitimate’ mean? According to laws that are passed? And if the laws are bad laws? And who will administrate it?”

It’s a sure bet that someone who doesn’t take these questions seriously is concerned with power, not justice. Pope Francis’s use of the word “legitimate” certainly suggests questions about where authority lies and how it is exercised can’t be passed over. Unless you happen to know a godly king languishing in crownless obscurity whom we ought to restore, these are exigencies we just have to deal with in our nominally republican system, but Stoker Bruenig acts like it’s just a matter of bigger budgets for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

For the record, I’d be more comfortable knowing my money was well spent on a tax for the relief of the poor levied by a Catholic monarch than one passed by Congress in a secular nation-state and enforced by the IRS. Is that so insane? That a king’s sense of social justice might in some instances be better than the choices expressed by a hundred million meaningless votes, mediated through a duopoly, a zillion special interests, and what’s left of a constitutional process? This arrangement makes villains out of Republicans too, with even Reagan and especially Bush the Younger busting budgets and leaving it for the Democrats to clean up, a strategy Irving Kristol endorsed.

It’s not like the conservatives who stick in Bruenig’s craw don’t have a leg to stand on. The social teaching of the Catholic Church presents significant obstacles for a Christian socialist, chiefly its condemnations of socialism. Reconciling those issues seems like it ought to be an important task for someone who describes herself that way, but so far Stoker Bruenig seems more interested in reminding the world that Ayn Rand is in hell than tackling these more interesting things. Indeed, bashing nasty conservatives and harmless libertarians is all she seems interested in doing. Whether you’re Michael Novak or a Tridentine Mass goer, you’re all not only wicked reactionaries, but worst of all, modern ones, just symptoms of a benighted country “full of crypto-fascists,” clearly more loyal to Goldman Sachs and the GOP than the pope.

When the dictatorship of the proletariat is established, if the socialists behave toward their enemies the way self-styled Christian socialists behave toward theirs now that they’ve got a pope they think agrees with them, the rest of us will be in for a rough time.


A U.S. defence and foreign affairs think tank released a comprehensive report today suggesting the oft-maligned F-35 might not meet the performance standards of current fighters, including Canada's CF-18s.

The National Security Network, a non-profit foreign policy group based in Washington, D.C., is the latest organization to raise questions about the stealth fighter program, which is over budget and behind schedule in the U.S.

The report compares F-35's operational capabilities with the jets it is intended to replace, including the F-16, F-18 and A-10, and in each case it comes up short.

Story continues below advertisement

The group urges the Obama administration to do a "serious" reassessment of the program and determine whether there are alternatives out there.

Researchers noted that matching the F-16's manoeuvrability was a minimum design requirement, yet they conclude the older jet is capable of going faster and enjoys better wing-loading performance, another aspect that's critical for speed.

The F-16 is not considered as manoeuvrable as the F-18.

The Harper government put its purchase of 65 F-35s on hold after being accused by the auditor general of fudging the price tag and not doing sufficient research, and plans to extend the life of the CF-18s to 2025.


One of the big paradoxes of living in a democracy is that our leaders seem to need protection from the very people who elected them to office.

Even as women, the poor and the disadvantaged run from pillar to post for basic things like physical safety – whether it is rape and molestation or violence - our politicians have scores of gun-toting commandoes being wasted on them. Even in the security-conscious West, we do not see so many politicians receiving so much protection.

From X to Y to Z and Z-plus, many of our top-level politicians, both in or out of power, have unnecessary protection being given to them at the cost of the taxpayer. (To get a list of those receiving protection, read here)

For example, people with Z-plus security have as many as 36 police persons assigned to them followed by 22 for those in the Z category, 11 for those in Y and two for those with a mere X to their names.

This is not only an enormous waste of taxpayer resources, but is actually becoming counterproductive with our netas seeing security as some kind of status symbol. The more we give politicians free security, the more they will start believing they are masters and the rest of us their servants.

This is particularly vulgar when the ordinary people get very little protection from crime or criminals.

As citizens, it is now time to demand a curtailment of our netas’ security expenses by making one simple demand: that official protection should be available only to political chief executives at centre or states. This means the Prime Minister and the Chief Ministers of various states. The rest should receive only normal institutional protection – just as any citizen is provided police cover if there is an immediate threat to him.

Applying this principle would mean no state protection for politicians such as Sonia Gandhi and her children, no cover for LK Advani, Mulayam Singh, Mayawati, etc, etc.

Security experts may be aghast that our leaders will become more vulnerable due to this demand, but lack of state spending on their protection does not mean no protection at all. What it means is that the individual will have to pay for it himself. Or herself.

This is how it should work.

Top politicians in the major national and regional parties should create their own security apparatus for their leaders. Donations to political parties are anyway exempt from income-tax, and so paying for private security guards should be well within their means.

Rich politicians should automatically be given no protection at state expense at all. For example, what is the logic in providing Mulayam Singh, or Mayawati, who is a Rajya Sabha MP, or LK Advani or Kalyan Singh or Rajnath Singh security at our expense when they can afford it themselves? Or their party can provide for it?

Mayawati’s last-known net worth was a hefty Rs 112 crore. The BSP leader, who claims most of her wealth came from small contributions, should use these contributions to provide for her own security. Mulayam Singh’s assets also exceed Rs 100 crore. Ditto for Advani, or Kalyan Singh, both of whom are close to retirement.

They should be protected by their parties, which benefited from their activities in the 1990s, and not the exchequer.

There are good reasons why security expenses should be brought down for politicians.

First, it is not morally right for politicians to seek protection at the expense of the people. Especially when they are out of power. They should share the risks their people face.

Second, it's the sheer futility of it. Having a bunch of security guards around you is no security at all when it comes to committed terrorists. Did high security save Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi? Minimal, discreet security is often good enough.

Third, there is no reason why out-of-work politicians should not live like the rest of us and be responsible for their own security. They should take simple precautions, and pay for that little extra that private security can provide with personal or party funds. If the police are freed from the responsibility of guarding netas, they can act more professional and protect the people better. Trying to protect too many netas means denying the same to us.

Fourth, providing too much security is counter-productive in a democracy. Not only does it separate politicians from their people, it also builds in them a vested interest to create no alternative leaders. The real strength of a democracy is in the depth of leadership it can create, so that it is not worthwhile even for terrorists to bump off the odd top politician or two.

It is time we abolished running a taxpayer-funded protection racket for politicians.

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Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.

An open letter to the campus community:

Swarthmore, I’m a big slutty slut. I have a lot of sex with a lot of different men because, frankly, I love men and a few ladies, because, frankly, college. And here’s why: I love sex. I love everything about sex and every personally-defined variation of sex: I love to kiss and to come and to cuddle and to explore new sexual frontiers. I love sweet sex and rough sex and nights with no sex. I love all the accoutrements of sex: I love underwear and birth control and sex toys and porn. If I were to honestly list my skill sets in rank order by an algorithm accounting for both enjoyment and aptitude, sex in all its iterated glory would top that list by leaps and bounds (and you should know I bake a mean pie, write an even meaner thesis, and gain a great deal of satisfaction from both of them).

Let me clarify: I’m not a slut because I’m out of control of my own sexuality. I’m not a slut because I’m hoping to rope a guy into wanting to be with me. I’m not a slut because I’m looking for some kind of validation or self-esteem boost. I’m a slut because I make the active, intentional, self-aware and enjoyable choice to be. I’m a slut because I choose to call myself “slut.”

My choice of the word slut is ultimately motivated by society’s warped and uneven attitudes regarding some notion of essential, inherent female sexuality vis a vis that of men. Ours is a society where women ”put out” their goods to please men, where it is nearly impossible to imagine a girl who goes out and beds a new guy every weekend who isn’t in some way damaged, or immature, or looking for some form of validation. This is a society where, rigidly, men just want to get some and get out and women are responsible for keeping men’s natural desires at civilized bay.

Make no mistake: this society of Brobible.com, of Tucker Max, of pick-up games, of most RomComs, of things as seemingly mundane as the scorn inherent in the term “walk of shame,” is a society which seeks to control women’s bodies, sexuality and choices to conform to a specific notion of a way to be a “good” girl, a “good” woman. This is a society of rape culture, plain and simple, and these types of policing of specifically gendered bodies and choices are prototypical slut-shaming.

This unfortunate aspect of capital-S “Society” is by no means a not-in-my-collegiate-bubble kind of issue either. Slut shaming is alive and well on Swarthmore’s campus. We hear it in the scornful tones with which we remember certain alumnae, see it in the raised eyebrows of friends of friends as they recount an acquaintance’s Saturday night hookup, read it in the comment sections of our sex columnists and gossip blogs. It’s tempting to think that as a community of progressive, forward-thinking, and generally socially aware individuals, we wouldn’t be bolstering these kinds of harmful understandings of sexual constructs, that these views exist only on the fringes.

But the lived reality of sluthood at Swarthmore is a surprisingly difficult one, even when not interacting with the obviously slut-shaming margins. We are greeted with a community aura of sex-negativity or at best sexual cluelessness. Institutionally speaking, the administration has a record of responding to issues involving sexuality with either a sort of manic, nip-it-in-the bud attitude, or an ill-advised stance of ignore-the-problem-and-it’ll-go-away. They have a well-known past of extraordinary blundering bordering on victim-blaming regarding instances of sexual assault (albeit one that is happily and actively changing in recent months). They responded to past instances of sexual assault at Genderfuck by proposing to cancel the party, as though preventing drinking and dressing skimpily would prevent the underlying factors of sexual assault (read: assaulters). The Dash for Cash, the singular intentionally body-positive and administratively-endorsed campus tradition – which was well publicized and opt-in – was canceled at earliest possible opportunity. And in an egregious, though since-resolved, issue a few years ago, a campus wellness campaign could find the funds to provide free yoga mats for students, but not free condoms. Overall, Swarthmore does a very good job of making the sex-positive, sexually adventurous, and promiscuous among us feel like we’d have a pretty precarious safety net availible if something happened to make us feel uncomfortable.

In this context, it is an intensely loaded and personally meaningful move to re-appropriate the traditionally venomous epithet of “slut” to fill the void in sex positive vocabulary to describe myself, my actions, my choices as a sexually active, aggressive, and generous woman. Is the choice of this moniker a comfortable one for all us sex-positive sex fiends? Absolutely not. But the entire point of making this term available to be self-selected is to reinforce, reiterate, and celebrate the agency with which a person might approach their sexual experiences, partners, and identity.

For me, being slutty is about more than just getting it in on Saturday night. It’s about rejecting the social imperative to ignore my own desires and keep my legs shut in order to be desirable, to be acceptable, to be the “right kind” of girl/woman/person. It’s about identifying and going after what I want. It’s about claiming and owning and enjoying my own body and sexuality and about the euphoria of exploring the miraculous, bizarre, and thrilling intricacies of another person’s. It’s about holding yourself accountable for your own sexual choices and health and holding society accountable for its own sexual bullshit.

Sluttiness is not about the number of dates or make outs or hookups it takes for you to feel comfortable rounding all or one or any bases with another person. In fact it’s not about numbers at all. The emphasis we place on our own sexual numbers is just another example of rigid, moral socio-sexual policing. How many women’s magazine articles have you read which essentially roil in what they’d have you believe is the eternal question: to disclose numbers or not to disclose numbers? You know what? Fuck that. Share or don’t, that’s your call, but don’t imbue this number with some sort of synthetic and sacrosanct meaning. Sexual numbers are meaningless. They tell you nothing about a person. They don’t tell you whether or not to get tested, as you as a sexually active or potentially sexually active adult should be getting tested with regularity anyway. They tell you nothing about the content of a person’s character or their childhood or their relationship with their father or their mother or their feelings about their own body.

So yeah, let’s talk numbers in the seven years since I’ve become sexually active.

98: the number of people I’ve made out with.

24: the number of people I’ve gone down on.

14: The number of people I’ve had penetrative sex with.

8: The number of people with whom I’ve gone out on dates.

You know what that tells you about me other than I might have busyish Saturday nights? Absolutely nothing. Some numbers that might be more meaningful in telling you who I am as a person:

325: the number of hours I spent teaching peer-run classes on sexual health, body image, and healthy relationships in urban schools my senior year of high school.

1: the number of times I’ve had my heart broken.

4: the number of scars I still have from the abrupt end to a fun day spent bike riding with my dad when I was seven.

0: The number of people I’ve slept with without being immediately upfront about the date of my most recent STI test, whether or not I’m sleeping with other people, whether I am available for anything above and beyond casual fun and without first ascertaining all of this information from them.

So here’s the deal, Swarthmore. We’ve tried to have this conversation before. Last semester, columnist Hester Prynne opened her installments with a discussion of reclamation and hers was an excellent primer extolling the virtues of sluthood. This past week a Swassip post turned into a comment-war fueled indictment of the morality of those externally impugned as sluts. In both instances, there has been frustratingly little safe room in the ensuing conversation for those living a life navigating the murky waters of Swarthmore with multiple partners. It’s time for real talk: an introduction to a conversation on the lived realities of identifying and acting sluttily on a campus slightly deluded as to its own sex-positivity. So here it is, an above-ground forum for a conversation not only about sluthood or about sluts, but with and from those of us who have made this choice for ourselves. I am slutty; hear me roar.

See you next week, Sex Fiends, Slutfriends, fellow sluts, and – largely – Swatties,

the Tart


Olivia Wilde

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Actress-social entrepreneur

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Fundraising is the bane of every philanthropy's existence. Do-gooders go back to the same rich donors over and over trying to convince them to keep giving. Actress Olivia Wilde thinks there's a better way. That's why she's co-founded Conscious Commerce. The company pairs brands with causes to help corporations become better global citizens. So profits from a best-selling dress at Anthropolgie go to a girls' school in India. A limited edition bag at Alternative Apparel helps fund a school in Haiti. "I've always been a huge proponent of voting with your dollars," says Wilde. "I'm inspired by the movement of entrepreneurs from my generation who are encouraging people to think about where their dollars are going." This year Conscious Commerce raised $100,000 for New Light, a community-development project serving the women and children of a red-light district in Kolkata, India. Conscious Commerce now shares time with Wilde's acting, but she's getting raves for her recent performance in the movie "Drinking Buddies."


As some of you are aware just yesterday we announced Team ZZX's in development Zelda clone game that was coming to the ZX Spectrum at some point during 2018, well that game isn't the only one that's in development as we've just been told by the creator David Clarke, that he is also making a Legend of Zelda game, and that one is being developed using Arcade Game Designer. In light of this news there's even more footage to show, and even though it doesn't have sound, it looks pretty decent!According to David he is coding this for the ZX Spectrum as a learning exercise with more possibilities for the future, and although there is no sound, it will be added later. Furthermore he has also mentioned he is having a go at multiple enemies using the parama variable for the first time, although he has warned this may well be another unfinished project!: 1) Source


KPS Teacher "walk-in"

Kalamazoo Public Schools teachers stood outside school buildings and in their entrances on Wednesday, Feb. 17, to support changes that make standardized testing less cumbersome and more effective. - Courtesy Photos

KALAMAZOO, MI -- Teachers at many of the Kalamazoo Public Schools will participate in a demonstration before class on Thursday.

Members of the Kalamazoo Education Association will participate in a "walk in" at 7 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 6. Teachers, administrators and staff will gather outside school buildings 30 minutes before the academic day begins, demonstrating with signs to promote the need for more funding and less focus on standardized tests.

Amanda Miller, president of the KEA, said the union's 800 members will all participate in some way in the awareness-raising campaign, coordinated by the group Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and part of a national effort.

Miller said tests like M-STEP, which are administered in the spring and have results returned in the fall, don't give teachers any way to help students during the school year.

"Teachers love tests if we can get immediate feedback and use it for instruction," Miller said. "If we don't get the results (until the next school year) and we're spending all this time on it, it's (not worth it). Kids need to be doing things that are beneficial instead."

Once the scores do come back, Miller said are being used to punish schools.

"Tests don't take into account of all the other aspects of (a student's) life like poverty," she said.

The online exams are also a drain on resources, requiring technology purchases and staff to deal with technical issues on test day.

The organization supports giving students access to an engaging and rigorous curriculum that does not base their success on high-stakes testing.

Last year about 80 cities participated in the effort. This year, Miller said 200 cities are expected to join the walk-ins, which were moved to October to bring education issues to the forefront during the election cycle.

Parents, students and members of the community are also invited to attend and wear red to show solidarity with the cause. Miller said the walk in concept is a more positive way to demonstrate as opposed to a strike or walk out.

"We appreciate the leadership of our association regarding the important themes of school funding and time for learning and appreciate the opportunity to join others across the country in this consciousness-raising activity," said KPS Superintendent Michael Rice in a statement.

A similar demonstration was coordinated in February. Many teachers carried signs that read: "All our children deserve more time for learning, less time for testing."

For more information, visit reclaimourschools.org.


The AAP’s latest attack on Reliance Industries does more than simply divert attention from their failure to govern; unfortunately for them, it also underscores the two main elements of their core ideology. On display is not only their dogged commitment to destructive populism over basic economic rationality, but also, and far more dangerous, their scornful contempt for constitutional democracy. By pressuring the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) to lodge an FIR against Mukesh Ambani and others in the absence of either jurisdictional authority or an iota of evidence, Kejriwal has sent shockwaves across the international business community, which would rather steer clear of India’s shores than risk engagement with a berserk anarchist. A bare perusal of the hyped complaint against RIL reveals fanciful conjectures and childish conclusions that are grounded in neither law nor reason, but advance a bizarre counter-narrative that believes in profit being evil. Scratch beneath the surface, however, and the real picture emerges.

The crux of Kejriwal’s charge against RIL is based on the infantile assumption that capital expenditure costs were unreasonably inflated to generate higher profits for the operator and less for the government. To substantiate this charge, he cites the Comptroller Auditor General’s flawed performance audit report on KG-D6 to allege that procurement contracts were arbitrarily awarded without due competition. He forgets that the mind-boggling scale of the Krishna Godavari basin (over 7, 000 sq km) necessitates an equally gigantic survey and exploration effort which is both expensive and technically complex, meaning in turn that very few international players operate in this niche segment. Unlike a standard building contract where it is possible to have a blend of different contractors, deep-sea extraction is one of the most complex engineering feats known to man and it would be impossible to execute a project on this scale with a mish-mash of contractors. For the CAG, without any technical expertise or knowhow about the complexities of subsea exploration, to simply declare that one contractor ought not to have been picked over others, is not only irresponsible but laughable. Besides, even the global consulting firm, Ernst & Young, confirmed that any increase in capital expenditure would in fact hurt the contractor’s profitability.

However the CAG’s insistence to audit private contractors raises fundamental questions of propriety that must not be ignored. The mandate of the CAG is circumscribed by the Duties & Powers Act of 1971, which outlines the scope of their powers to audit the accounts of public corporations. This law supplements Article 149 of the Constitution, and the two being in pari materia, must be read together. The CAG’s scope of audit is restricted to accounts of the Union and cannot extend to private entities. The hon’ble Delhi High Court, in its order on the 6th of January 2014, was absolutely correct when it reined in an overzealous CAG by ordering it to restrict itself to only the revenue-sharing arrangements that private telecom companies had entered into with the GOI. The court was very specific when it said that the CAG could only audit receipts and not inquire aspects like wisdom and economy in expenditure. An example of this overbearing sense of ‘duty’ is found on page 33 of the KG-D6 report, where the CAG adopts an irritatingly patronising tone in awarding unnecessary accolades to “the efforts of the operator in executing this world class…within record time.” Constitutionally speaking, the CAG has no business to be making such silly comments – they ought to stick to their mandate.

The CAG report also ignores the legislative intent behind the New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP), which was to provide an incentive to private contractors, to tap domestic energy sources that PSUs like ONGC and OIL could not. The driving force behind this policy shift was not merely liberalisation of the economy, but a concerted effort to make India energy independent, and to reduce the nation’s staggering fuel-import bill. In making the simplistic argument that RIL’s higher gas prices lead to a subsidy burden on the economy, Kejriwal has wilfully ignored both, the saved fuel import-costs and the substantial GDP contribution made by domestic contractors. GOI currently pays up to $15 per million British thermal units (mmBtu). By Kejriwal’s logic, India ought to pay billions of our precious and scarce foreign exchange to international gas providers but deny an Indian corporation from making a legitimate profit for the massive investment it has incurred, simply because the government subsidises the fuel. Even keeping aside the billions of dollars India saves by encouraging a domestic entity, why doesn’t Kejriwal talk about the billions that the Indian government receives as its share of profit from KG-D6? Would he rather than India be at the mercy of foreign gas-producers than achieve energy security? Even keeping energy independence aside, the creation of jobs and enhanced shareholder value aid in spurring growth and confidence in the economy that benefits everyone.

It may certainly be argued that RIL and its partner NIKO got the initial gas estimates for KG-D6 wrong, but to suggest that billions were spent by them to execute some elaborate heist is ludicrous. Subsea gas reserve estimates spread over thousands of square kilometres are often off the mark. At times production is way more than the original estimate and at other times it is less. However the production sharing contract contemplates such eventualities, which is why the safeguard of variable profits depending upon production is built into the agreement. To cry foul simply because production levels did not match the original estimates is akin to the losing side in a game of cricket asking for the rules to be changed midway. Kejriwal is understandably irate because he can’t write his own personal version of the PSC.

Lastly, the stunning allegation that RIL’s KG-D6 partner NIKO supplies gas at half the price to Bangladesh is another spin on the truth. The fact is that NIKO’s gas deal with Bangladesh has absolutely nothing to do with KG-D6. On the contrary, NIKO provides gas from an on-land gas field near Dhaka. The implication of this on cost is obviously immense – with dramatically cheaper production and transportation bills, thus resulting in a lower price.

With none of his political opponents too keen to entertain his shenanigans, Kejriwal was ultimately left with the ignominious route of pulling the plug on himself. Only time will tell if his gamble pays off electorally. But for anyone to assume that the people of India will ignore his dismal record, would be akin to gassing the truth.


China makes headlines every other week for its censorship of the Internet, but few people outside the country know what it's like to live with those access controls, or how to get around them.

Foreigners who visit the country should expect some headaches. Be prepared to live without Google, Twitter and your favorite daily newspapers, and to have a hard time connecting with friends back home, or even firing off an email. That's how bad it can get.

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"Connection Timed Out" is the dreaded error message when you try to visit a blocked site. It makes you think the site itself is down, but it's actually the "Great Firewall" at work, a vast censorship system that blocks access to many of the world's most popular services.

I've lived in China for close to six years and censorship has been a near constant, lurking in the background ready to "harmonize" the Web and throw a wrench in my online viewing.

It's been especially evident this month. Google's services, which don't follow the strict censorship rules, are currently blocked. How long that will last is unknown, but it coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests earlier this month -- an event the Chinese government wants no one to remember.

Losing access to the world's biggest search engine is enough of a nuisance, but the censorship also affects Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Play, the Chrome browser, and even the news and weather widget that loads on my Android phone. Some of those services are running erratically or not at all. Most annoying is that friends can send me messages on Google Hangouts but for some reason I can't reply.

The censorship is a culture shock for foreigners visiting China for the first time. They expect to chat with friends on Facebook or Twitter only to find those services unavailable. Major publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are blocked. You need to find alternatives for all these things. I often end up using Microsoft Bing, which complies with China's censorship rules.

Plenty of other foreign websites are accessible, including Reddit, Buzzfeed, Yahoo, and politically non-sensitive Wikipedia pages. Most foreigners here end up subscribing to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which let you mask your location and bypass the censorship. I've been using a VPN for four years and the US$7 a month is money well spent for access to the entire Internet.

China's censorship wasn't always this strict. When I arrived to teach English here in late 2008, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all were available and I could use Google's Blogger.com to record day-to-day experiences. All that ended in 2009 when China began blocking sites more actively. In March that year, supporters of the Dalai Lama -- an unwelcome figure here -- released a YouTube video that appears to show Chinese police beating Tibetans. A few months later, ethnic riots broke out in Western China, and the authorities cut access to Twitter and Facebook.

Blogger.com had already fallen victim in May, and to keep my blog alive I emailed posts to my dad in the U.S. so he could update it for me. Eventually I bought a domain name and blogged through GoDaddy, which wasn't blocked.

All this censorship happens without official explanation. The Chinese government rarely mentions the topic or says why particular sites are blocked, but it's clear the authorities do everything they can to control what China's 618 million online users can access.

All local Chinese sites abide by the censorship rules or risk being shut down. That means China's largest search engine, Baidu, filters out sensitive content, like any mention of the Tiananmen Square protests. And social networks like Sina Weibo delete posts about contentious topics, or ban users who have gone too far. In rare cases, Chinese police have even sought out and arrested Internet users for starting online rumors.

But China's Internet is far from bland. While you can't access YouTube, Twitter or Google, there are Chinese equivalents, albeit with regulated content. Video sites show U.S. TV shows like "The Walking Dead" and "Homeland," and online users can discuss some controversial matters, like celebrity scandals and even corruption by low-level officials. But it all happens under the watchful eye of censors, who keep the discussions from crossing a line.

It's partly why many Chinese don't notice the censorship; there's enough leeway that the Internet is still a useful medium. Most don't miss Facebook or Twitter because they can connect via WeChat, a local messaging app used by hundreds of millions. China effectively has its own Internet, with its own providers and its own rules. So far, none of the big U.S. Internet firms has managed to make significant headway here, and the ones who try must play by the rules. LinkedIn, for instance, which entered the market this year, is drawing flak for blocking posts about political matters in China.

There's little sign that the country's stance on censorship will change anytime soon. The clampdowns on foreign services tend to come and go, but this latest block on Google could remain indefinitely. Last November, citing threats to stability, the government laid out plans to control access even more.

I recommend anyone visiting China buys a subscription to a VPN service. I've used one provided by Astrill.com and it's a must-have for me. Hopefully China won't block it.


Ten years ago, Jules Urbach had an insight.

Back then, film companies would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on rendering, which turns 2-D or 3-D models into photorealistic scenes and is used in CGI (computer-generated imagery) animation, for just a few thousand frames. At 24 frames a second, that adds up just to a few minutes of an entire movie.

He realized that the way they were doing it — using a type of processor called a CPU that is commonly used in computers — it was never going to get faster or cheaper.

Instead, he realized it could be done 40 times faster on a type of processor known as a GPU, which is a graphics cards designed for gaming devices such as Playstations and Xboxes.

That is now the most common method of rendering video games. And to accommodate demand, his company, OTOY, founded in 2009, and its main software, OctaneRender, have been using GPUs in the cloud with services such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure.

Even back then, he could see that the appetite for such work might grow to the point it would be difficult for his company to keep up. So he dreamed up — and patented — the idea of a peer-to-peer network where anyone with some GPUs could contribute work to render scenes and pay out each of these contributors. Back then, the Bitcoin network had just started running and no more than a few academics and tech hobbyists knew about it. But now, as the cryptocurrency market has exploded and options like Ethereum are available to build new blockchain-based networks, Urbach’s vision is now possible — and OTOY is launching a token for it: Render.

“The demand for this work is so high that we have no other choice but to have another solution,” he says. “A lot of people are familiar with rendering in terms of computer graphics in films but it’s seeping into all parts of our lives. People don’t realize it’s in advertising, in billboards, in your Zillow real estate Matterport capture.”

[Ed note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.]

OTOY is just one of a number of existing non-blockchain-focused companies that are issuing tokens to launch decentralized networks in their industry. The first to announce such an initiative was Kik messenger app, which recently raised $98 million but fell short of its goal of $125 million. Despite having 15 million monthly active users a month, only 10,000 people purchased tokens for its proposed token-based network for digital communication. While OTOY has an impressive roster of advisors, including Eric Schmidt, the chairman and former CEO of Google, and Brendan Eich, the cofounder and former CEO of Mozilla and CEO of Brave software, which launched the Basic Attention Token, plus big-name clients such as Facebook and Unity, it remains to be proven that an established company can successfully create a token-based network that also attracts its competitors and users outside its base and is therefore truly decentralized.

OTOY’s Render token could be well-positioned to do so. This year, it secured a deal to provide the entire rendering pipeline for Facebook — the social network’s virtual reality camera data uses OTOY. “OTOY has long been on the cutting edge of rendering technology. Their products were a natural fit for our efforts in pushing media to a new level of immersion,” said Eric Cheng, Facebook’s head of immersive media, by email. OTOY has also partnered with Unity, software akin to a Photoshop, but for mobile games such as Pokemon Go. Unity claims its software is used to make a third of top games. And the VR/augmented reality industry could be on the cusp of taking off. A July 2016 Goldman Sachs report projected that VR/AR will see $95 billion in revenue by 2025 — comparable to the $111 billion hardware market for laptops and $63 billion for desktops. Goldman and Deutsche Bank anticipate VR/AR will become a bigger part of a variety of sectors including gaming, live events, virtual shopping experiences or “v-commerce,” healthcare and fitness, communication such as Skype or FaceTime, trainings and education, tourism, and social experience apps such as watching movies with others through VR.

OTOY estimates that what is called the OctaneRender Cloud Network could bring on seven million users (mostly game developers on Unity). Advisor Eich also sees potential for Ethereum miners to switch to Render. “As Ethereum evolves toward proof of stake or other future technologies that don’t require GPU power, that become more power efficient, the GPUs that were for mining Ethereum could be used on Render,” he says. Urbach even imagines iPhones and iPads doing rendering as they recharge overnight, though he calls that an “ambitious” goal.

However, according to a Markets and Markets report, rendering is now only a $1 billion industry and is expected to grow only to $2.9 billion by 2022, so that may limit the potential market cap for the Render token, especially since the network wouldn’t constitute the entire industry. OTOY, using other projections, projects that revenue in 2021 would be $10-$20 billion even if RNDR took just 2% of the industry.

While some crypto players like Eich are excited about the Render token, others are more skeptical. Brian Kelly of digital asset hedge fund Brian Kelly Capital Management says, “There’s nothing terribly unique about it. It’s a model that could be replicated fairly easily. There’s not a big moat around it from what I can tell.”

However, Urbach countered in an email, “The centralized iteration of our rendering model hasn’t been replicated anywhere near our scale, and it’s a good indicator of how hard it is to scale to millions of GPUs in a decentralized way as we plan to do now with RNDR.”

Lucas Ryan of cypto hedge fund Metastable Capital wasn’t convinced the token was necessary and felt such rendering work could be paid for in, say, Ether. Also, Golem network, a decentralized computing platform, might work just as well. Urbach says payment in other tokens doesn’t scale and notes that with Render (unlike Golem Network Tokens), a hash of the assets used behind the render source enables the tokens to be easily distributed to the contributors, putting IP rights on the blockchain.

Render is aiming to raise $134 million from its token sale, which starts October 5. As with the other existing companies launching tokens, it will be interesting to see how well OTOY can redirect its success so far with its company toward a decentralized network.

Be sure to get Forbes' twice-weekly all things blockchain email newsletter, Crypto Confidential! Sign up here.


Image copyright Oxford University Image caption These images produced by the researchers were 0.07mm across - smaller than the width of human hair

Scientists have patented a new way to make ultra high-res displays that can bend and are thousandths of a mm thick.

They used a miniscule layer of a phase-change material, that flips between two chemical states when hit with current.

By sandwiching it between transparent electrodes, they made pixels just 300 nanometres across and produced images smaller than the width of human hair.

The design, published in Nature, could be useful in wearable technology, smart contact lenses or foldable screens.

According to Prof Harish Bhaskaran, who led the research at Oxford University, it will be "at least five years" before any applications appear.

But as far as Prof Bhaskaran is aware, the resolution of the images his team produced is among the highest ever achieved. "I haven't seen any other technology that approaches 100 or 200 nanometre resolution," he told the BBC.

You could roll out your screen from inside a pen Prof Harish Bhaskaran, Oxford University

Phase-change materials are commonly used in heat management, because they absorb or release heat in switching between an orderly, crystalline state and a more chaotic "amorphous" state. Because their optical properties change with these states as well, they have also proved useful in data storage, such as rewritable DVDs.

The key to the new design is a very thin layer of one of these materials: an alloy containing germanium, antimony and tellurium (Ge2Sb2Te5, or "GST" for short).

Instead of using GST to encode ones and zeros within the rings of a DVD, Prof Bhaskaran's team sandwiched it in between two layers of a transparent material that conducts electricity, producing a three-layered film no thicker than 0.0002mm. Then they painted a picture into the GST, pixel-by-pixel, by delivering current to different points across the film.

Electrical current causes the GST to switch states - and change colour. In this way, the researchers produced a number of microscopic images.

Image copyright Oxford University Image caption The team produced films that were flexible and semi-transparent

They also demonstrated that the technique could produce different colour changes, by using different thicknesses for the outer layers of the sandwich.

None of the pictures move - yet - but the team has filed a patent because of the potential to develop a new generation of flexible, thin, high-resolution displays.

"The cool part about this is that the functional part is very thin," explained Prof Baskaran. "Because of that you could actually have displays that are non-intrusive, because you can keep the electronics far away."

This contrasts with current LCD displays, which require transistors immediately behind the screen to switch the colour of the pixels.

"Think of having a pen - and you can roll out your screen from inside the pen, but the electronics are contained within the pen," Prof Baskaran said.

Other mooted applications include smart glasses or contact lenses, and even synthetic retinas, if the technology could be rejigged to convert pixels of light into electrical impulses.

The design could also offer big energy savings, because the pixels would simply stay put until they need to be changed.

Image copyright Oxford University Image caption A microscopic image of a well-known Oxford landmark, made up of 150x150 300-nanometre pixels

"Unlike most conventional LCD screens, there would be no need to constantly refresh all pixels, you would only have to refresh those pixels that actually change," said Dr Peiman Hosseini, the study's first author.

"This means that any display based on this technology would have extremely low energy consumption."

Dr Stephen Kitson runs the Bristol display technology company Folium Optics, developing other strategies for flexible, high-resolution displays, and is also a visiting professor at the University of Western England. He said the findings were promising.

"It's a really challenging area, to get something that's bright," he told BBC News. "There's a way to go, to see if they can get the dynamic range that you'd need - in other words, can you switch from really bright to really dark.

"They've got some interesting colour switches there, which is a brilliant first step."

Prof Bhaskaran agrees this is only the first stage. "We're showing that we can combine thin-film effects with a super-thin layer of phase change material, and get colour out of it," he said.


Soon Spoon To Help Diners Score Impossible Reservations

Thought you couldn't get that last-minute table at Menton? Well, now you can.

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Have you ever wanted to eat at that cool new restaurant that only seats 30 guests? Reservations are undoubtedly at a premium and you’re often forced to make a reservation two weeks out. And that’s if you’re searching for a two-top. What about those times when friends or family are in town and your party is bigger than four people? Forget it.

That conundrum of quality, spontaneous dining is at the heart of Soon Spoon, a new restaurant reservation service that launches on March 19. Cofounders Travis Lowry and Conor Clary are working in conjunction with some of Boston’s hippest, most compact restaurants to provide last-minute dining options at places such as Clio, Uni, Farmstead Table, and Puritan & Co.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever tried calling these types of places on a 4:30 on a Friday, but it can be very difficult,” says Lowry. “Some places are good about it. Menton always picks up the phone, but for most small restaurants it’s just very hard because they might only have one or two people answering phones. So what ends up happening is you end up going to the place where … you can walk in—that’s not of the same quality—but hey, you know, [you] can get a table.”

Soon Spoon currently has 17 restaurants that they’re working with, but they hope to build that number up to 50 ideal spots by the end of the year. Lowry describes their approach with potential restaurant partners as “price agnostic,” instead focusing on “special, unique kind of places.”

“We don’t approach restaurants because they’re the most expensive,” says Lowry. “There’s a lot of restaurants that are very expensive that we’re not a good fit for. We work best in a place like East By Northeast that seats 29 or Bogie’s Place that seats 15 in the back of jm Curley. We want to create this club of diners that love these restaurants and are open to eating at the last minute.”

Unlike OpenTable, Groupon, and Beeline—which stop updating reservation availability after service begins—Soon Spoon will provide to-the-minute data via text messages, email, and the website. Soon Spoon’s reward system might not have typical perks such as coupons or appetizer discounts, but they will have a point system to provide personal touches like artisanal chocolates, pastries, and a seat at monthly pop-up dinners in private residences around Boston.

Soon Spoon’s point system works the other way as well, detracting points for cancellations and no-shows. An impetus for creating the concept was Lowry’s own last-minute cancellation at Strip T’s in Watertown. “I saw an opportunity to help both restaurants and diners,” says Lowry. “I felt terrible about canceling a reservation for six at Strip T’s. But those things happen all the time at restaurants. It’s not impossible to dine spontaneously. We help facilitate that fun, serendipitous experience.”


In mid-July 2014, Microsoft announced the first truly abysmal Lumia handset, the Lumia 530, setting a new low bar for the quality of entry-level smart phone handsets. So it was with some reservation that I took possession of the Lumia 535, a 5-inch sibling to the 530 that also targets the low-end of the market. I shouldn’t have worried: This is a great entry-level device and the model for Microsoft to follow for future Lumia handsets.

Indeed, that has apparently already happened: Just this past week, Microsoft introduced two other low-end handsets aimed at emerging markets, the Lumia 435 and 532, and both will cost under $100 at launch. These devices clearly take more cues from the Lumia 535 than they do from the Lumia 530, and that’s a good thing.

But today, let’s focus on the Lumia 535, which is now fairly broadly available, see and how it differs from the 530.

Microsoft launched the Lumia 535 in November 2014 and its immediate claim to fame was that it was the first Lumia handset to carry the Microsoft branding. (Previous Lumias all bore the Nokia name.) I don’t find that to be particularly interesting personally, but it was the headline at the time.

The Lumia 535 is powered by a 1.2 GHz quad core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor, 1 GB of RAM, and 8 GB of internal storage (expandable via microSD). Most of those core specs represent important upgrades from the lackluster Lumia 530, which features the same processor but is hobbled by only 512 MB of RAM and an unacceptable 4 GB of internal storage.

The biggest improvement over the 530, however, is the screen. Where the Lumia 530 features an embarrassingly bad 4-inch LCD display running at 800 x 480—easily the worst screen I’ve ever seen on a modern smart phone—the 535 features a decent 5-inch qHD (960 x 540) IPS display with Gorilla Glass 3. And while it can’t claim to be HD resolution, everything in the Windows Phone OS scales nicely, though small text isn’t as razor-sharp as I’d like. You also need to be looking at the screen dead-on for the best quality—viewing angles aren’t great, as you can see below—but it’s a smart phone. That’s how you use it.

(Like many other low-end Lumias, the 535 lacks hardware Back, Start and Search buttons and instead employs a software-based navigation bar that includes these buttons. I like this navigation bar for a few reasons—it’s much harder to hit the Search button by mistake, a common issue with Windows Phone handsets, for example—but it also means that the UI is taking up some onscreen real estate at times. You can configure the navigation bar to auto-hide, or you can manually do so at any time, which is really nice.)

There’s another important difference between the 530 and the 535, and here again we see Microsoft taking a good idea to heart for newer devices like the Lumia 435 and 532. Where the Lumia 530 includes only an accelerometer sensor, the Lumia 535 is equipped with a more reasonable array of sensors, including ambient light, accelerometer, and proximity. And these little doohickeys go a long ways toward making for a better experience: Unlike the 530, the Lumia 535 supports display auto-brightness, and the screen will dim when you raise it to your face to make a phone call.

The rear camera on the Lumia 535 is pedestrian as they come, it’s a 5.0 megapixel unit with LED flash. But it also has a front-facer 5.0 megapixel wide angle unit that appears to be very similar to the “selfie” camera on the Lumia 735. By comparison, the Lumia 530 doesn’t even have a front-facing camera, and the rear unit—also 5.0 MPX, but with a fixed focus—lacks an LED flash. The Lumia 535 doesn’t have a camera button, a missing feature now common across all of Microsoft’s low-end Lumias. (You have to step up to a mid-range Lumia 830—which costs an unforgiveable $500 unlocked—to get a dedicated camera button.)

A few other points about the specs. Like the recently-announced Lumia 435 and 532, the 535 is aimed at emerging markets, so it does support dual SIMs—still a curiosity here in the States—but only 3G/HSPA cellular networking. So there’s no LTE support at all, limiting the 535’s appeal in established markets. That said, it is running Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1 with Lumia Denim, and is at this moment the only phone I have capable of running the Lumia Camera app, though of course the camera isn’t powerful enough to use any of that app’s advanced new features. (And the pictures it takes are nothing special.)

I outfitted the review unit with a microSD card so I could load it up with media—and offload as much apps and data from internal memory as possible—and use the Lumia 535 the way I think it will be most often used in places like the United States (though you cannot at the moment even buy this device here from a wireless carrier): As a media player. And in this capacity, the Lumia 535 absolutely shines, and it has replaced my previous Lumia media player, the 635, which has a smaller 4.5-inch screen.

Before I could get that microSD card into the 535, however, I had to figure out how to get the back cover off. Many Lumia devices feature a removable back cover, allowing you to access hidden SIM card and microSD slots, and a removable battery, or replace the cover with a differently-colored cover or flip case. And as you might expect, I’m quite familiar with how these covers work. Yet, I’ve had a heck of a time getting the 535’s back cover off.

I’m not entirely sure why. The cover itself is much thinner than other Lumia covers, which contributes to this device’s delightfully thin form factor. But this thinness is responsible for a certain creakiness I’ve never experienced in other Lumias—including the otherwise terrible Lumia 530, which has a thicker and more solid case—and also, I think, to my issues removing it. In fact, I’ve bent the cover around the USB hole because I’ve struggled with it so much.

Fortunately, Microsoft sells replacement covers. Not here, in the United States, of course, but I was able to order a delightfully retro Lumia cyan-colored case from Alibaba to replace it. (It hasn’t arrived yet, and I’m not ready to recommend this option to potential US-based buyers.)

Looking at Microsoft’s international sites, I see this device is available for about 95 pounds in the UK ($144 USD), and Expansys is selling the device to US customers for $129. When you consider that a no-contract version of the Lumia 635 is currently selling for about $129 in the US as well (sometimes a bit less on sale) this seems like a great price, and given the option I would opt for the Lumia 535 personally.

Of course, most 535 buyers are coming at this device from a different worldview. It’s either their first smart phone, or they’re moving to the 535 from a previous device that wasn’t as full-featured. And aside from all the hardware niceties available here, it’s worth remembering that it features all of the latest Windows Phone features—Cortana, Skype, Office, OneDrive, and Lumia exclusive apps—plus some neat camera functionality, especially with the front-facing selfie camera, and is both expandable and customizable. And Microsoft sells a number of colorful accessories that can complement this purchase. There really is a lot of value here.

The Lumia 535 is a fine low-end smart phone and a great example of what’s possible in this market segment. Cheap doesn’t have to mean low-quality. And the Lumia 535 is just the latest in a growing family of inexpensive Windows devices that delivers great value for those without a Platinum American Express card. As such, the Lumia 535 is highly recommended.

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Beeswax is produced by honeybee “worker” bees. They secrete it from glands on the underside of their abdomens then chew it up and mold it into the cells of the combs. That’s why they call them worker bees. It’s a big job for the beekeepers, too, who collect it from the hives and melt it down into cakes. (At least they don’t have to chew it.) The reason beeswax is a bit pricey is because for every 100 pounds of honey harvested, a beekeeper will get only one to two pounds of beeswax. It’s not easily come by, but maybe that’s also why beeswax is so very, very wonderful.

In candles, beeswax smells delicious, requiring no added scent, and it burns longer and cleaner than other waxes. It also has beautiful, natural color.

My latest batch of beeswax candles.

Beeswax has a melting point of 143-148 degrees. I prefer it for container candles. For tapers, you need a wax with a higher melting point. The best way to make beeswax tapers is to buy pressed beeswax sheets and roll each sheet tightly around a wick. (Dipped beeswax can make messy tapers that puddle. I prefer to use taper wax–see Hand-Dipping Tapers.)

You can also use beeswax to make lip balms, skin creams, and herbal salves. When I was researching beeswax, I found the same recipes in multiple places, so I’m not sure of the original sources. (Probably our great-grandmas.) The recipes I’m posting are ones I’ve experimented with and found useful. The first one is for a beeswax cream that is really nice for the hands in the winter.

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FYI, these measurements are by volume, except for the beeswax, which is by weight (weighed before melting).

Beeswax Moisturizing Cream:

4 ounces sweet almond oil

1 ounce beeswax

2 ounces water

8-10 drops essential oil (optional)

8-10 drops Vitamin E

Melt the almond oil and beeswax. Remove from heat and stir in the water. Stir in remaining ingredients. Stir as it cools–before it becomes too cool to pour, transfer to a container (or divide between smaller containers).

You can also make a super easy “Vaseline”-type moisturizer by combining 1/2 cup baby oil per ounce beeswax. After you melt the beeswax, remove from heat and stir in the baby oil. (You can add a few drops of essential oil, too, if you want more scent. I really like beeswax just how it smells naturally.)

There are beeswax lip balm recipes all over the place, but this is one I like that is a Burt’s Bees knock-off.

Beeswax Lip Balm:

1 teaspoons grated beeswax

2 teaspoons coconut oil

1/2 teaspoon lanolin

liquid from one Vitamin E capsule

2 drops lemon or orange essential oil (optional)

1 teaspoon honey

Melt everything together with the beeswax in a microwave-safe bowl (except for the essential oil and honey). If you don’t want to use the microwave, you can also place the ingredients in a little custard cup inside a pot of water on the stove; heat gently to melt. Remove from heat and stir in the essential oil and honey. Transfer to a small container. (This even tastes good.)

You can make a healing salve with different essential oils, depending on what you need, such as tea tree oil (good for cuts and burns).

Beeswax Salve:

2 ounces beeswax

1 ounce jojoba oil

3 ounces sweet almond oil

1/2 ounce vegetable oil

essential oil*

*Research the specific essential oils you are interested in before determining the safe quantity to use for your purposes.

Melt beeswax together with jojoba oil, sweet almond oil, and vegetable oil. Remove from heat. Stir in essential oil, if using. Transfer to a container. You could also mix in various crushed herbs instead of using essential oils.

Beeswax is also the ultimate furniture polish.

Beeswax Furniture Polish:

2 ounces beeswax

1/2 pint turpentine

1/4 ounce lemon or orange essential oil (optional)

Melt the beeswax. Remove from heat and immediately stir in the turpentine. Add the essential oil, if using, and keep stirring as it cools. Transfer to a container. This makes a creamy polish that is great to lovingly rub into wood.

Aside from polishing, beeswax is a great protectant and waterproofing agent for wood. I love this recipe for “Spoon Oil” that was posted on the CITR forum by Buckeye Girl here.

Spoon Oil:

16 ounces mineral oil

4 ounces beeswax, cut in chunks

Warm the mineral oil by placing the container in a pot of warm water. Place beeswax in a wide-mouth jar and melt in a double boiler. Remove from heat and slowly pour the mineral oil into the melted beeswax. Stir as it cools. Use to rub into wooden spoons. Also great for reviving cutting boards.

Bees always scare me a little bit, but I love their stuff!

*Make things with beeswax safely–see my guidelines and precautions for melting wax here. You can find beeswax online at craft and candle suppliers, etc. Lanolin, coconut oil, jojoba oil, and sweet almond oil can be found online at health and beauty suppliers, and a lot of the same places where you buy soapmaking and other craft supplies including essential oils. (These are not expensive supplies other than the essential oils, if using.)

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Posted by Suzanne McMinn on February 7, 2011


On Media Blog Archives Select Date… December, 2015 November, 2015 October, 2015 September, 2015 August, 2015 July, 2015 June, 2015 May, 2015 April, 2015 March, 2015 February, 2015 January, 2015

poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201310/1902/1155968404_2780947835001_vs-526fca73e4b03283b83fd6df-1592194023001.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true The Republican National Committee's new ad blasts Obamacare and plays off the famous "Get a Mac" ad campaign run by Apple from 2006 to 2009. RNC to run Obamacare ad during Daily Show

The Republican National Committee will be running an anti-Obamacare commercial during Tuesday's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" in the Washington, D.C. market, the RNC announced Tuesday morning.

The ad that will run Tuesday is part of a series of four videos created by the RNC playing on the famous "Get a Mac" ad campaign run by Apple from 2006 to 2009. In the videos, a younger man plays the private sector, while an older, overweight and fumbling man plays the new healthcare law and the HealthCare.gov website.

"These videos help to convey the absurdity of ObamaCare and the administration’s careless behavior," RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement.

(WATCH: The best of last night's late-night TV)

It's clear who the RNC is trying to target with the ad during the Daily Show - the exact population the new health care law is relying on to buy health insurance in order for the whole system to function. But, the ad is only running on "The Daily Show" in the Washington, D.C. market, one full of federal government workers and contractors, many of whom have health insurance through their jobs.


I started going to counseling when I was 25. My counselor was a pastor and respected man in his 50s. At the time I was in a deep depression and was suicidal. I had never been in counseling before so I didn’t know what the counselor/client relationship was supposed to be like. At the time, I wanted to die, and going to this counselor was the only hope that I could hold on to. I depended on him. I gave him my trust, and I told him my deepest thoughts, feelings, and fears. This brought me a sense of closeness to him. He emphasized that closeness.

I had often wondered if our friendship that came from the many counseling sessions was too close of a relationship. It is hard to differentiate what should and shouldn’t have happened between us. We became really close and I did feel loved by him, but should I have? Was my counselor being inappropriate? How do you know when to tell someone to stop loving you when you feel so alone and horrible about yourself as I did at the time? It seems like I should have been able to figure it out, but in the midst of things, all I knew was that I needed him so that I could stay alive.

Was I responsible to stop something that I didn’t even know was happening? If so, when should I have known to stop it? Was my counselor being inappropriate? Here are some examples of the things that my counselor did that took us down this path.

He:

Sat next to me on the couch in his office when I was severely depressed

Held me while I cried

Got me a free membership at a gym

Found a place for me to volunteer where his wife worked

Talked with me on the phone at any time when I was sad or wanted to die

Let me stay at his house for safety on a night when I was going to kill myself

Confided in me about his struggles

Asked me if I would still trust him if it was found out that he had done something wrong

Took me on a fast ride in his son’s sports car just because

Met with me at a coffee shop one day instead of his office to tell me he was fired as a counselor because he had an affair with another client

Told me he had been seduced by the woman client he had the affair with

Continued to see me one on one after being fired as a counselor

Met me at my work and took me out to lunch regularly

Called and talked to me for hours when his wife was out of town

Hung up on me when we were talking on the phone if his wife came into the room with him

Caused me to get suicidal because he was suicidal

Told me that I understood him in a way others did not

Didn’t tell his best friend about me because his best friends wouldn’t understand our special relationship

Held my hand while walking around the city

Kissed me on the top of the head when we would say goodbye

Told me that he loved me on a regular basis

Was my counselor being inappropriate? Were any of these things ok? These things made me feel special at a time in my life when I thought I was a horrible person. Not being a counselor myself, I didn’t know about boundaries in counseling. I didn’t know about relationship definitions between counselor and client and the possible negative impact these could have on my mental health. I didn’t know that a counselor should just be a counselor or that I should be learning to have strength on my own and not get all my strength from my counselor.

How is a person in the midst of the biggest struggle of her life supposed to have the strength to stop something that she don’t even know could be wrong or damaging? When someone loves you in what you thought was a pure love, how do you say no?

After years of these things, I ended up being the one to start questioning him. I asked him if his wife knew about us meeting together. I asked him if any of his friends knew about our friendship, especially his best friend. I started questioning whether a married man should be telling his deep struggles to another woman. I started wondering if I was the other woman…

…and then one day, when I called him, he said, “Oh, I didn’t know it was you.” Then he hung up on me. He never spoke to me again. I guess I got my answer.

Sharing this makes me feel very exposed and even ashamed that I didn’t recognize what was happening sooner. So, why do I tell all this? I want you to know that these things are not ok. I want you to be able to recognize some signs that your counselor may be going down the wrong road with you. Maybe you can avoid the confusion and pain that I went through. If your counselor is trying to become more than a counselor, it is not ok. The counselor is not helping you at that point, they are helping themselves. You need help from a counselor, not confusion. You deserve not to be deceived or used for someone else’s gain. Please know that you are worth having a safe counselor to go to. A counselor that will respect you and the counseling relationship.


Caracas, September 24th 2012 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – North American film director, Oliver Stone, has spoken out on the Venezuelan elections from the San Sebastian film festival in Spain, where he stated that current Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez would “win the elections again” in October and that his opponent, Capriles Radonski, was “not a good guy”.

“If he (Capriles) won, he would hand the country back to the upper classes,” stated the veteran director, who was invited to the 60th anniversary of the film festival to receive a lifetime achievement award alongside Hollywood actor, John Travolta.

Stone, who directed the documentary “South of the Border” which tells the story of Latin America's new wave of elected left-wing presidents, went on to confirm that the Chavez is “in good health,” despite the fact that the Venezuelan leader is currently recovering from an undisclosed form of cancer.

The openly left-wing film-maker also used the festival as a chance to make a series of political commentaries, including his desire to see former Spanish president, José Maria Aznar, tried at the Hague due to his collaboration with George W. Bush and Tony Blair in the Iraq war.

He furthermore made a series of statements relating to current US politics, and denounced Washington for pursuing Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange.

Despite his criticisms of the current US administration, Stone said he would vote for Barack Obama in the upcoming US presidential elections, even though he considers the Democrat leader to be “not a very important leader, and even less so if he cannot change this direction to the right that we are taking”.

Stone is currently promoting his new film “Savages,” which focuses on the issue of the narcotics industry in Mexico. During the presentation of the film in San Sebastian, the film-maker strongly criticised the “stupidity” of the Washington sponsored “war on drugs”.

“Forty-two years ago we (the US) started the war against drugs... and now there are more drugs, which are cheaper and better than ever... the US doesn't use the war on drugs to fight against drugs and the violence generated by them, but to spy on other countries and to enter other countries, such as Colombia, Mexico, Afghanistan or Pakistan, to put their people there and.. militarise them,” he stated.