When everything goes Wrong

Fear and failure are illusions that are self-created. Close your eyes and ask yourself. “What is your biggest fear?” Typically mostly will answer with, “failure” hoping to demonstrate they don’t look for failure in their future. When you close your eyes.

What you’re sitting down on, that is substance. It’s real, it’s holding you together. We know that is a fact, because you haven’t fallen. But, everything you see, everything you touch, everything you hear, everything you taste, and smell is self-created in your mind. It’s something you create from perception. If you can understand you can create something just from your perception, you’ll realize you’re able to create anything. You can make the impossible, possible. So, before you open your eyes, remember that power you hold within.

And, with that power, try to move forward only with the substance and power you control. One of my favorite quotes that I try to live by is, “Miracles are just a shift in perception from fear to love.” The truth is, is that if you are fearful of failure, it’s impossible to move forward in life. Failure is just a matter of perspective. You can fail, but how you choose to react to it defines what kind of future you will have. We can choose to see failure as ‘the end of the world,’ or as proof of just how inadequate we are. Or, we can look at failure as the incredible learning experience that it is. Failure stop us only if we let it. Failure isn’t substance, it’s just a mere illusion of our insecurities. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas A. Edison Read

Kim watching Obama

On a cold afternoon in February, several former American officials hurried to the Hilton hotel in Berlin, a city long known for its Cold War spies and intrigue. They had traveled there for a private meeting with senior representatives from North Korea, the most reclusive government in the world. Over the next two days, the Americans gathered in one of the hotel’s modern conference rooms and listened to a surprising new proposal. Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, the North Koreans said, wanted to resume negotiations in hopes of ending decades of hostility between the two countries.

The timing was significant. A month earlier, the U.S. had agreed to talks to formally end the Korean War, but that effort collapsed when Washington demanded the North’s nuclear weapons program be part of the discussions. A few days later, the Hermit Kingdom, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), set off what it claimed was a hydrogen bomb at an underground site in the country’s rugged northeastern mountains.

That nuclear test, the country’s fourth, left U.S. officials scrambling for new ways to deal with the threat from one of the world’s last communist regimes. Obama then adopted a hard-line approach that essentially echoes the stringent policies of President George W. Bush. Obama refused to engage in direct talks with Pyongyang until the regime first demonstrated it was willing to give up its nukes. In the meantime, the U.S. tightened sanctions against North Korea, believing the poor, isolated country would eventually collapse or agree to denuclearize. Two years later, famine forced Pyongyang back to the negotiating table. In early 2012, Obama and Kim reached an agreement that required the North to freeze its nuclear and ballistic missile programs in return for 240,000 tons of U.S. food aid. But soon afterward, that deal fell apart when Pyongyang fired a missile to launch a satellite. In 2013, North Korea conducted its third nuclear test.

The best Repair

FLINT, Mich. — As I walked into Jackie Pemberton’s petite white house in the southeast corner of Flint, she apologized for the mess (there wasn’t one) and offered me a cup of coffee. “River water all right?” her husband, John, asked without a hint of irony. Jackie burst into laughter. Jackie has lived in Flint for much of the past 48 years, and for many of those, she owned a drain-cleaning business that counted several industrial factories as clients.

 “I saw what they put down those drains,” she told me, shaking her shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair in disgust. So when the city switched its water source from Lake Huron to the murky waters that ran through Flint in April of 2014, she refused to drink it. The idea of it made her ill, she said, thinking about all the industrial chemicals, sewage and road salt that had made their way into the river over the years. John, however, keeps an old soda bottle filled with water by his side whenever he’s home, and he filled it with tap water frequently. Mindful of her limited budget as a retiree, Jackie gave in after six or eight weeks and started drinking the water as well. By late summer, they both started having stomach problems, losing hair and developing rashes, as did several of their children and grandchildren who either lived elsewhere in the city or periodically came to stay with them. In August, E. coli was found in the city’s water, forcing Flint to issue multiple advisories to residents to boil the water before use.

By October, the Pembertons had become regulars at City Council meetings along with a group of other residents concerned about water that smelled of sulfur and chlorine, often came out of the tap tinted the color of urine or rust, and appeared to be causing a long list of health concerns. “I drank the water for eight or nine months,” John said. “In the poor parts of town, those people drank it for one and a half years. Some still are.” Today, we know that those health concerns include poisoning from a well-understood neurotoxin: lead. That realization has led to international outrage, protests from Flint residents, and the resignation of several federal, state and local employees, though not as many as some Flint residents would like. More than a year after residents started sounding alarm bells, it’s now clear that employees at the state’s Department of Environmental Quality collected insufficient data and ignored the warning signs visible in what they did collect. In the process, they allowed the residents of Flint to be poisoned.

Officials at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the agency in charge of making sure water is safe in the state, made a series of decisions that had disastrous consequences: Against federal guidelines, they chose not to require the Flint water plant to use optimized corrosion control, despite telling the Environmental Protection Agency they were doing so in an email on Feb. 27, 2015.

When moneys goes wrong

A movie theater (also called a cinema) is a venue, usually a building, that contains an auditorium for viewing films, for entertainment. Most, but not all, movie theaters are commercial operations catering to the general public, who attend by purchasing a ticket.

 Some movie theaters, however, are operated by non-profit organizations or societies which charge members a membership fee to view films. The film is projected with a movie projector onto a large projection screen at the front of the auditorium while the dialogue, sounds and music are played through a number of wall-mounted speakers. Since the 1970s, subwoofers have been used for low-pitched sounds. In the 2010s, most movie theaters are equipped for digital cinema projection, removing the need to create and transport a physical film print on a heavy reel. A great variety of films are shown at cinemas, ranging from animated films for children, blockbusters for general audiences and documentaries for patrons who are interested in non-fiction topics.

The smallest movie theaters have a single viewing room with a single screen. In the 2010s, most movie theaters have multiple screens. The largest theater complexes, which are called multiplexes–a design developed in the U.S. in the 1960s–have up to 25 screens. The audience members typically sit on padded seats which in most theaters are set up on a sloped floor, with the highest part at the rear of the theater. Movie theaters typically sell soft drinks, popcorn and candy and some theaters also sell hot fast food. In some jurisdictions, movie theaters are licensed to sell alcoholic drinks.

What a F**k get off

The Greeks and Romans are known to have played many ball games, some of which involved the use of the feet. The Roman game harpastum is believed to have been adapted from a Greek team game known as "ἐπίσκυρος" (Episkyros) or "φαινίνδα" (phaininda), which is mentioned by a Greek playwright,

Antiphanes (388–311 BC) and later referred to by the Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria (c.150-c.215 AD). These games appear to have resembled rugby football. The Roman politician Cicero (106–42 BC) describes the case of a man who was killed whilst having a shave when a ball was kicked into a barber's shop. Roman ball games already knew the air-filled ball, the follis. Episkyros is recognised as an early form of football by FIFA.[14] I
n 1871, English clubs met to form the Rugby Football Union (RFU). In 1892, after charges of professionalism (compensation of team members) were made against some clubs for paying players for missing work, the Northern Rugby Football Union, usually called the Northern Union (NU), was formed. The existing rugby union authorities responded by issuing sanctions against the clubs, players, and officials involved in the new organization. After the schism, the separate clubs were named "rugby league" and "rugby union".