some test material

test_docs/aj_china_landslide_kills.txt

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+At least 16 people have died and dozens more have been buried after a landslide swept through a village in the mountains of southern China, local government and state media have said.
+
+The landslide smothered 16 homes on Friday morning in Zhaojiagou village, and hours later more than 40 people were missing, said a notice posted on the website of Zhenxiong county in Yunnan province, where the village is located.
+
+Rescuers recovered 16 bodies, among them a family of seven, said a report on the website of the Yunnan Daily, the official newspaper of the provincial government.
+
+Photographs posted on the news site showed rescue crews in orange jumpsuits using construction machinery to sift through massive piles of mud and earth.
+
+Behind them stood hillsides and pine trees covered in snow, signs of the unusually cold winter that has hit all of China.
+
+Reports did not say what triggered the landslide, but such events do occur periodically in the region, which is prone to earthquakes and heavy rains.
+
+In a nearby county, 81 people died after an earthquake in September.
+
+A month later, a landslide buried a primary school, leaving 18 students and one other person dead.
+
+Cold spell
+
+Elsewhere in the southwest Guizhou province, an estimated 420,000 people are in a "state of disaster" due to the freezing weather, state-owned People's Daily said. 
+
+Over the past few days, temperatures in China have plunged to their lowest in 28 years, with frozen coastal waters, cancelled flights and closed highways.
+
+In the city of Genhe in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the temperature reached a low of minus 44.8C, marking the fourth big temperature drop the region has experienced thus far this winter.
+
+The cold front has also contributed to heavy fog, which has reduced visibility in some areas to less than 70 metres and is affecting traffic and travel throughout the region.
+
+The extreme weather is forecast to continue for the next three to five days according to the local meteorological department.

test_docs/aj_china_one_child_disent.txt

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+China's one-child policy has created a generation that is less trusting, more risk-averse and perhaps less likely to become entrepreneurs, according to new Australian research.
+
+Published in the journal Science on Friday, the study of more than 400 Beijing residents who were born around the time the controversial population policy was first introduced could have implications for China's economy, researchers said.
+
+"We found that individuals who grew up as single children as a result of China's one-child policy are significantly less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious," said University of Melbourne researcher Nisvan Erkal.
+
+China introduced the policy in 1979 to combat population growth and family planning officials in Beijing have defended it in the past, saying China's population, currently 1.3 billion, would have hit 1.7 billion without it.
+
+In an interview with Al Jazeera, Hong Kong professor Joseph Cheng said the study confirms what Chinese academics had warned as the "undesirable impact" of the rule.     
+
+In recent years, there have been stories of parents and grandparents accompanying new university students "to wash for them and to cook for them", Cheng said.
+
+Additionally, the drop in the number of young workers entering the labor marker could contribute to an economic slowdown and decline in domestic consumption as early as 2015, Cheng said. 
+
+Economic games
+
+During the study, scholars used a series of "economic games", in which the 421 subjects born between 1975 and 1983 exchanged or invested small amounts of money, or made other economic decisions, to measure their levels of trust, risk-taking and competitiveness.
+
+In one game, participants born under the one-child policy were on average found to be less trusting than those born before, sharing less of an endowment with another player.
+
+"We found that being born before or after the one-child policy best explains our observations," Erkal, an associate professor, said.
+
+Fellow researcher Lisa Cameron from Monash University said the effect could have economic implications.
+
+"Our data shows that people born under the one-child policy were less likely to be in more risky occupations like self-employment," she said.
+
+"Thus there may be implications for China in terms of a decline in entrepreneurial ability."
+
+The one-child policy in fact permits some families to have several children. Parents in the countryside can have two children if their firstborn is a girl, while ethnic minority families are often exempt from birth restrictions.
+
+Talk of phasing out the unpopular one-child policy has been mounting, with an influential think-tank with close links to the government recently proposing families be allowed to have two children by 2015.
+
+The China Development Research Foundation called for a relaxation of the policy in October, saying the country had paid "a huge political and social cost" for the measure, which has been blamed for creating a demographic time-bomb.

test_docs/aj_syria_rebels_capture.txt

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+Syrian opposition fighters have overrun Taftanaz airbase, the largest in northern Syria, after several days of fierce combat, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said.
+
+Anti-government activists said fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra and other groups opposed to President Bashar al-Assad seized control of buildings, ammunition and military equipment in the sprawling Taftanaz airbase in northern Idlib province on Friday.
+
+"The fighting at Taftanaz military airport ended at 11:00 am (09:00 GMT) and the base is entirely in rebel hands," said Rami Abdel Rahman, the director of the UK-based rights group, on Friday.
+
+"Many regime forces have been killed and most of the soldiers and officers fled at dawn," he told the AFP news agency by phone.

test_docs/aj_un_troops_malawi.txt

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+The UN Security Council has called for a swift deployment of foreign troops to Mali to rein in ultra-conservative armed groups in charge of the country's north.
+
+The call on Friday comes as the fighters are vowing to capture more territory in the West African nation.
+
+Diplomats at the UN in New York said Dioncounda Traore, Mali's interim president, had appealed to Paris and UN chief Ban Ki-moon for help.
+
+Citing a letter from the president, Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN, said: "It basically said: 'Help - France'."
+
+France is Mali's former colonial ruler and the two countries maintain bilateral relations.
+
+Francois Hollande, the French president, told a meeting of diplomats in Paris on Thursday his country would respond urgently to Mali's appeal, but would only act under the auspices of the UN.
+
+"They are trying to deliver a fatal blow to the very existence of this country," Hollande said of the Islamist groups that control the north of Mali.
+
+"France, like its African partners and the whole of the international community, cannot accept this."
+
+Al Jazeera's Rory Challands, reporting from Paris, said French military officials would neither confirm nor deny reports that French troops had already arrived in Mali.
+
+"We did hear from a spokesman with ECOWAS, the bloc of West African nations, that the UN has endorsed to go in with a military force into Mali … They did almost as good as confirm that the French were there but they're saying the French are there purely to train Malian troops and to offer logistical support."
+
+Following an emergency meeting on Mali, the Security Council called for a "rapid deployment" of an agreed African force to the country and expressed "grave concern" at the capture of the town of Konna by "terrorists and extremists groups".
+
+'Foreign' troops
+
+ECOWAS has agreed to deploy a force of up to 3,000 to help end the insurgency, which gained momentum and saw the capture of large swathes of territory in the wake of a coup staged by junior army officers last March.
+
+The officers behind the coup said it was prompted by the failure of the government to contain the rebellion.
+
+Although UN officials had warned that no troops were likely to arrive before September, witnesses told the AFP news agency that foreign troops and weapons had already begun arriving.
+
+AFP said witnesses said the troops arrived by transport plane on Thursday to bolster government forces in central Mali, but it was unclear what country they came from.
+
+France had so far offered only logistical support to the regional force.
+
+Witnesses told AFP of military aircraft landing with weapons and foreign soldiers at an army base in Sevare, just 60km from Konna.
+
+One witness at the airport reported seeing weapons and soldiers leaving a C-160 military transport aircraft, adding: "Some of the men were white."
+
+A Malian official, confirming the arrival of the military aircraft, said they included one plane from a European nation that left men and equipment at Sevare, but did not say which one.
+
+Earlier on Thursday, Abdou Dardar of Ansar Dine, one of the groups occupying northern Mali, told AFP that Islamist fighters had taken Konna, northeast of the regional capital of Mopti.
+
+"We almost entirely control the town [of Konna]. Afterwards, we are going to continue" pushing south, Dardar said by phone. Witnesses told AFP that Malian troops were retreating.

test_docs/antipope_fang_fuckers.txt

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+So, I just wrote and handed in a vampire novel.
+
+What bit me?
+
+(Author pauses to allow the shower of rotten tomatoes to subside ...)
+
+Vampires in fiction are a cliche. But a cliche isn't necessarily a bad idea; it's actually a good idea that has been overused.
+
+Here in the real world, we don't see a lot of blood-sucking species. I'll grant you leeches and desdemontid bats. But these are highly specialized parasites. Blood is actually a rather crap food source in many ways: it's high in protein, really low in fatty acids and sugar, and vampire bats need to consume a third of their body weight in blood per day just to stay alive. It's no accident that vampire bats and leeches usually pick on host species that are several orders of magnitude larger than the haemophage! A hypothetical humanoid (and human-sized, mammalian, and human-predating) fanged fiend would have to leave a horrendous trail of drained corpses behind it—just one obligate humanoid haemophage would be enough to increase the UK homicide rate by around 50-70%.
+
+Hence the first line of "The Rhesus Chart" (which is due out in July 2014):
+
+"Don't be silly, Bob," said Mo: "Everybody knows vampires don't exist."
+
+So what are vampires good for?
+
+Leaving aside a whole bunch of different mythological tap-roots, some of which are quite interesting in their own right, the modern western interpretation of the vampire is largely the fault of Bram Stoker (although he, in turn, was working in a literary tradition with notable antecedents such as Varney the Vampire).
+
+The interesting thing about vampires in fiction is what they're used to represent. Vampires are the talkative reflection of our fears; unlike horde-shambling zombies they're singular entities, intelligent and outwardly handsome, the exterior shell concealing festering horrors within. And the nature of the horrors in question changes with time. Back in Stoker's hey-day, the fear of contagion, of the degeneration and insanity that went with syphilis, was clear: so was the clash of uptight Victorian public morality and private lascivious debauchery that went with it. (It's no accident that Vampirism-as-AIDS was the big metaphor of the 1980s: blood, sex, and death are deeply intertwingled in our collective id.)
+
+More recently, we have a whole bunch of other vampire metaphors. There's the untrammeled greed angle, the psychopathic serial killer angle, the sexual predator. Vampires are rapists, non-consensual sadists and torturers, serial killers. They are, above all, parasites and sociopaths—you can't be a vampire, a successful apex predator upon people, and feel much empathy for your prey.
+
+So what do we make of that sub-species of vampire that fucks its food?
+
+One of the weirder twists in the development of a sub-genre happened some time in the early 1990s, with the advent of the paranormal romance. In retrospect it's fairly obvious what they're for; they allow the reader to vicariously explore emotional aspects of BDSM without the troublesome need to find a partner with a roll of duct tape and a flogger who also understands the need for safe words. (This may also be a side-effect of changing gender/power relationships in society at large causing confusion, uncertainty, or dissatisfaction with traditional power roles: don't tell the Pope. Ahem. There's a really complex knot of issues here, including the implications of the demographic transition for human interpersonal and familial relationships, that is probably food for several PhD theses.)
+
+Paranormal romance turned out to be a huge growth industry, inflating rapidly until it's a genre in its own right, and one that outsells traditional SF by a considerable margin. This is entirely reasonable if you view fiction as a play-tool we use to explore the emotional or intellectual scope of ideas that intrigue or disturb us. But that's not where I went with "The Rhesus Chart"; I had an existing framework (yes, it's the fifth Laundry Files novel) and wanted to explore a different issue—the existential dilemma that a non-psychopath might experience if they suddenly learned that in order to survive, they need to kill at least two people a year.
+
+Blood, death, rape, disease, sex, and greed are a far cry from the biology of haemophagic carnivores. We've come a long way from Transylvania, and I suspect there are many more miles left in this not-obviously-tired genre trope.

test_docs/antipope_merry_xmas.txt

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+Happy Newtonmass! (Yes, today is the anniversary of the birth of our rationalist saviour, Sir Isaac Newton.)
+
+I have a personal tradition of always putting in some working hours on December 25th — not being Christian, and being a bit of a curmudgeon, it seems important to do so (even if I subsequently drop round on some friends and eat and drink far too much). I can just about categorize blogging as work (it's marketing/communications, dammit!) so this is my work for the day.
+
+Because I'm a curmudgeon (the "G" in my initials is short for "Grinch"), the Christmas spirit thing really irritates me. A big part of it is the saturation-level advertising that crops up at this time of year: it leverages the winter festival to convey the message, "you will get into the festive spirit and Buy Our Stuff, otherwise you are socially inadequate". I do not care to be lectured about my social inadequacy by big box retailers: I especially dislike being defined as socially inadequate because I don't follow someone else's religiously-ordained festive tradition. Consequently, Christmas puts me in a contrarian mood. As a contrarian, right now nothing would cheer me up like a nasty, mean-tempered flame war — just to prove that the turbulent masses (this means you) haven't suddenly been turned into insipid, saccharine carol singers chorusing goodwill to all and peace on earth.
+
+But I couldn't make up my mind whether today's blogging should be "gun owners: evil or wicked?", or "abortion: if you oppose it, you are murdering women"; I'm sort of in donkey-starving-to-death-between-two-mangers mode today. (Normally I try to avoid starting flame wars. Turning to the dark side, I suddenly find myself in a target-rich environment!) So I decided to go with something a little less controversial; why Jesus Christ bears such a remarkable similarity to Osama bin Laden that by 2312 there may well be a syncretistic religion worshiping him as the second coming ...
+
+1. Jesus Christ is not his name. If he existed, his actual name would have been rendered in our alphabet somewhat like Yeshua bin Yussuf (he was later renamed Jesus™ by those pesky greeks). Also: forget that long-haired hippy 16th century Spanish nobility lordship you see in portraits of Jesus: he probably looked more like the guy on the left, only short and brown-skinned.
+
+2. Yeshua, like Osama bin Laden, was born as the heir to a family construction business.
+
+3. Yeshua, like Osama bin Laden, was a bit of a mystic and a dreamer. He dropped out of the family business, and took a good look at the society around him. In particular, he retreated into the desert for a while and tried to avoid the temptations of the flesh.
+
+4. Yeshua, like Osama, decided that it was extremely important to get the imperial hegemon of the day to pull its troops out of the holy places of his religion.
+
+5. With his followers, Yeshua attacked a major banking hub — the Wall Street of its day — in the shape of the money lenders in the temple grounds. (Due to the non-availability of weapons of mass destruction in his day, as opposed to Osama's, the temple survived.) (See also Revelations 18:11 and Revelations 18:19.)
+
+6. Yeshua, like Osama bin Laden, preached subversive sermons, which were widely circulated among the masses suffering beneath the imperial jackboot.
+
+7. Eventually Yeshua got up one privileged nose too many, and wound up being executed in a grotesque manner, to warn the masses (and his followers) what happens if you speak truth to power. See also Seal Team Six.
+
+8. Over the subsequent decades and centuries, the numbers of his followers increased — principally finding recruits among middle-easterners pissed off at the imperial hegemonic power's continuing occupation and exploitation of their holy places. The followers of Osama Yeshua multiplied in numbers despite organized clamp-downs and purges.
+
+9. Osama Yeshua's followers are — or were — big on holy martyrdom.
+
+10. ... Okay, I've now run out of immediate similarities between Jesus and Osama bin Laden. Help me, somebody?

test_docs/antipope_tapeworm.txt

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+What use is a human being — to a tapeworm?
+
+A mature tapeworm has a very simple lifestyle. It lives in the gut of a host animal, anchoring itself to the wall of the intestine with its scolex (or head), from which trails a long string of segments (proglottids) that contain reproductive structures. The tapeworm absorbs nutrients through its skin and gradually extrudes more proglottids, from the head down; as they reach the end of the tape they mature into a sac of fertilized eggs and break off.
+
+The adult tapeworm has no knowledge of what happens to its egg sacs after they detach; nor does it know where it came from. It simply finds itself attached to a warm, pulsing wall, surrounded by a rich nutrient flow. Its experience of the human being is limited to this: that the human surrounds it and provides it with a constant stream of nutrients and energy. A hypothetical intelligent tapeworm might well consider itself blessed to have such a warm and comforting environment, that gives it all the food it needs and takes away anything that it excretes. And if it were of a philosophical bent, it might speculate: what is the extent of my environment? Is it infinite, or are there physical limits to it? And, eventually, are there other tapeworms out there? And finally, the brilliant polymath-level Enrico Fermi of tapeworms might ask, if there are other tapeworms, why aren't they here?
+
+Our tapeworm-philosopher gets its teeth into the subject. Given that the human is so clearly designed to be hospitable to tapeworm-kind, then it follows that if there are more humans, other humans out there beyond the anus, then they, too, must be hospitable to tapeworm-kind. Tapeworm-kind has become aware of itself existing in the human; it is logical to assume that if other humans exist then there must be other tapeworms, and if travel between humans is possible—and we infer that it might be, from the disappearance of our egg sacs through the anus of the human—then sooner or later humans interacting in the broader universe might exchange eggs from these hypothetical alien tapeworms, in which case, visitors! Because the human was already here before we became self-aware, it clearly existed for a long time before us. So if there are many humans, there has been a lot of time for the alien tapeworm-visitors to reach us. So where are they?
+
+Welcome to the Fermi paradox, mired in shit. Shall we itemize the errors that the tapeworm is making in its analysis?
+
+The first and most grievous offense our tapeworm logician has committed is that of anthropocentrism (or rather, of cestodacentrism); it thinks everything revolves around tapeworms. In reality, the human is unaware of the existence of the tapeworm. This would be a good thing, from the worm's point of view, if it had any grasp of the broader context of its existence: it ought by rights to be doing the wormy equivalent of hiding under the bed covers, gibbering in fear.
+
+It has inferred the existence of other humans, but it doesn't know about cooking, or the other arcane processes by which food makes its way into the gut for the tapeworm to absorb. Or about the sanitary facilities that kill tapeworm eggs before they get to another, intermediate host. There are vast, ancient, alien intellects in the macrocosm beyond the well-known human, and they are unsympathetic to tapeworms. Intrepid tapeworm cosmonauts seeking to make their way beyond the anus and across the universe to colonize other humans are in for a rough ride indeed, for they are intimately evolved to thrive in one particular environment, and that environment (the mammalian gut) is sparsely distributed throughout the universe. Much of the cosmos is inherently hostile to tapeworms. This is why tapeworms have not, in fact, colonized the universe and converted all available biomass into a constantly spawning Gordian knot of Platyhelminthic life, contra the prognostications of some teleologically-inclined tapeworm-philosophers of yore.
+
+The human does not owe the tapeworm a living, or even a comfortable home. The tapeworm's existence is contingent on it not damaging its human, resulting in an undesirable human/tapeworm interaction with fatal consequences for the tapeworm. Some of the tapeworm's descendants might be able to find another new human to claim as their home, but the same constraints will apply. Only if the tapeworm transcends its tapewormanity and grows legs, lungs, and other organs that essentially turn it into something other than a tapeworm will it be able to make itself at home outside the human.
+
+(Note: I picked tapeworms, rather than the bacterial gut fauna, because nobody much cares what happens to an E. coli. Tapeworms, on the other hand, are multicellular eukaryotic organisms with differentiates tissues, have nervous systems and genitalia, and are probably much closer to us—practically kissing-cousins to our form of vertebrate life—than anything we might discover on other planets. Perhaps the biggest weakness in this metaphor is its reliance on humans. While we may attribute intentionality to many natural phenomena—the supernatural stance—those of us tapeworms who are hard-headed materialists must surely concede that the human Earth is not a sentient being, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fiction aside. On the other hand, if you want to traffic with the ghost-infested depths of the simulation hypothesis, then anything is possible. Even tapeworm-cosmonauts flying out of my arse ...)

test_docs/atlantic_banana_republic.txt

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+There's a fruity phrase on many pundits' lips these days, and it has nothing to do with high-quality sweaters and slacks. Henry Blodget wants to know if the United States has become a banana republic. Ezra Klein thinks we probably are: "The fact that we wish we were not a banana republic witnessing a full-blown meltdown of our treasured system of governance does not mean we are not, in fact, a banana republic witnessing a full-blown meltdown of our treasured system of governance." The foreign press agrees, and so does Andrew Sullivan. Neil Irwin isn't ready to say so yet, but he thinks that minting a $1 trillion platinum coin might do it.
+
+So are they right? Well, it depends how you define the term. So let's go back to the beginning. The term might not exist at all if William Sydney Porter hadn't been a drunk, a gambler, and an embezzler. Porter was better known by his pen name: O. Henry, the pioneering late-19th-century short-story writer. You probably read his "The Gift of the Magi" -- the heartbreaking story about a couple who each sell their most prized possessions to buy the other a Christmas gift -- in middle-school English class.
+
+In the 1890s, Henry fled to Honduras to escape embezzlement charges. In 1904, after returning, Henry published a book called Cabbages and Kings, in which he wrote about a nation called Anchuria, based on Honduras, and described it as a "banana republic," after the single product upon which its entire economic output depended. A phrase was coined.
+
+In time, the term came to describe any Central American nation whose economy depended on bananas. It took on darker connotations of economic imperialism with the rise of United Fruit Company, an American agricultural giant that viciously exploited workers, aroused the ire of left-wing parties across Central America, and was reportedly involved in various U.S. government interventions that propped up right-wing, anti-Communist regimes. More broadly, the term "banana republic" is often used to describe any nation that relies heavily upon natural resources and agriculture -- what economists call the primary sector -- to prop up its economy.
+
+But the U.S. doesn't meet any of these definitions. Domestic banana production is extremely low; our government is not dominated by a major overseas corporation; and the U.S. economy is actually heavily biased toward the tertiary, or service, sector of the economy.
+
+Now, this is perhaps too stringent a definition. What Klein et al. probably mean is that the threat of a sovereign default, which would be the likely result of a failure to raise the debt ceiling, is the sort of thing that happens in a banana republic. Is that fair? Here's a list of the top banana exporters as of 2005, via the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization:
+
+
+Of those countries, since 1990, Ecuador defaulted in 2000 and 2008; Cote d'Ivoire in 2000; Cameroon in 2004; and Brazil in 1990. 
+
+So really, it's pretty unfair to suggest that failure to raise the debt ceiling would make the United States a banana republic. Most banana republics have their affairs in much better order than that.

test_docs/atlantic_real_feminist_cowboy.txt

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+Earlier this week, I reviewed Alisa Valdes' memoir The Feminist and The Cowboy, in which she rhapsodized about her relationship with a manly, traditional, conservative ranch manager who had taught her to submit and renounce anti-male feminism. Yesterday, Valdes published a post on her website (subsequently removed) updating readers on her relationship with the cowboy. In earlier public statements, she had mentioned that she and the cowboy had broken up. What she hadn't said until now is that she left him because he abused her.
+
+For readers of The Feminist and The Cowboy, this is not exactly a shock. Despite Valdes's enthusiasm for the man, it seems fairly clear in the book that he is a liar, a bully, and a creep. At one point Valdes discovers that he has been texting the exact same flirtatious sexual fantasies to her and another woman at the same time, changing nothing but the name of the girlfriend in question. When she confronts him, he bullies her until she decides it's all her fault for contacting the other woman.
+
+Still, even though all the signs were there, Valdes's post is shocking in a numb, inevitable way. As in many relationships, the cowboy's escalation from controlling assholery to actual physical violence was triggered when Valdes accidentally became pregnant. When she said she wanted to have the child, the cowboy walked out on her. She lost the baby through a miscarriage, and foolishly went back to him...and then the violence escalated. Mostly he stuck to verbal abuse, with occasional physical threats, but there is at least one incident which she doesn't call rape, but which sure sounds like something close to it. Finally, Valdes realized that "this man did not love me. He could not love anyone," and she left him for good—though, obviously, something of the terror remains. She notes that writing the post puts her "in danger—real physical danger": by which I presume she means danger from the cowboy. (She was also worried that the post might damage her relationship with her publisher.)
+
+RELATED STORY
+ 
+Woman Rejects Feminism, Continues to Disdain Femininity
+In my review, I argued that The Feminist and the Cowboy idealizes masculinity and power. Valdes talks incessantly about the beauty of discovering her feminine, submissive side, but the real energy of the book seems to be directed not towards validating the submission, but towards idolizing the discipliner and his bullying. She says that dating the cowboy taught her to reject second-wave feminism's disdain for the feminine...but in fact, the book reads as if she had simply found someone who embodied that disdain for the feminine. And he embodied that disdain most obviously through his disdain for her.
+
+I don't think Valdes' post really changes my reading of the book—though it does make that reading significantly more depressing. The fact that the abused often identify with their abusers isn't news, of course. Judith Herman and Lisa Hirschman in Father-Daughter Incest (one of those second-wave feminist treatises Valdes says she's moved beyond) talk about how victims of incest often admire the "competence and power" of their fathers. The identification is part of the abuse—and, of course, enables it.
+
+In comments on her post, Valdes insists that she still rejects the feminist ideology that prevented her from trusting men. She insists she still stands by her claim that "feminism stole my womanhood."
+
+As I admitted in my review, there is something to the argument that feminism doesn't sufficiently respect femininity. But...good lord. Surely the answer to that is not abusive relationship as growth experience. Valdes's stereotype of feminism may not be right that all men can't be trusted, but clearly this asshole shouldn't have been. Can't there be some kind of reconciliation between feminism and femininity that doesn't involve women being terrorized by controlling, violent cowboys?
+
+Perhaps it might be helpful, in this respect, to take our eyes off Valdes for a moment, and look instead at the cowboy himself. Valdes attached a brief video of him explaining himself to the end of her post. In it, he says that he is 53, that he has never been married, and that he's very comfortable being alone. As a result, he says, he doesn't need to be dating. At the conclusion of the video, he says of his relationship with Valdes:
+
+If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. It doesn't have to work. So consequently maybe I wasn't willing to put up with as much.
+On Twitter, writer Isaac Butler described these words as "terrifying," and I wouldn't disagree with that. Part of what is so unsettling about it, I think, is the way that it comes across as so adult and rational; so non-co-dependent, so reassuringly, normally, stereotypically male. He sounds independent, grown-up, and sure of himself—he doesn't need a relationship, but he knows what he wants in one. He's strong. He's a man. He's a cowboy.
+
+And yet, as it turns out, the independence and reassuring manliness turns out to be a prelude to, and an excuse for, cruelty, and violence. For him, independence and empowerment mean not protection and equality, but sadism. His preferred method of emotional abuse—freezing her out and refusing to contact her or speak to her, or (in the book) locking himself in his room—is almost a parody of the stereotypical manly cowboy ethic. It would be funny, except that it isn't at all.
+
+The point being that, if Valdes, is going to insist on the virtues of femininity, one place she might try to think about encouraging, or celebrating, those feminine virtues, is in men. The cowboy's lack of neediness, his strong independence, starts to look suspiciously like pathology—not least since Valdes reveals that the cowboy was abused as a child himself.
+
+Normal people need other people. If that's feminine, then everybody should be feminine—just like if standing up for yourself is masculine, then everyone should be masculine. Valdes complains about emasculated modern men and manly women in The Feminist and the Cowboy...but of course, as it turns out, those weren't the problems in her relationship at all. On the contrary, a bit more manliness in her, and a bit more womanliness in him, seems like it would have left them both in a much better place overall.
+
+That's a reductive shorthand, of course. In truth, masculinity doesn't have to mean abuser, and femininity doesn't have to mean abused. But maybe one way to make sure they don't mean those things is to see them less as norms particular people have to fulfill, and more as potential possibilities we all need, both for ourselves and for those we love.

test_docs/atlantic_why_we_get_prune_fingers.txt

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+Here's a dinner party fact. If you were to soak a severed hand in a bucket of water, it wouldn't develop prune fingers. That's right, because finger prune-wrinkling is a nervous system response, not just some osmotic result of our skin absorbing water like a wet potato. 
+
+We've known that for a long time, but until this week, we didn't know exactly why that autonomic response existed. 
+
+ 
+steve.garner32/flickr; superfantastic/Flickr
+The 2011 journal article "Are wet-induced wrinkled fingers primate rain treads?" suggested that prune fingers work like car tires. The wrinkles channel water off of our fingers, so we get better traction on things we want to hold. But that was just their theory from the way it looks; they didn't actually test that it worked.
+
+This week, research in the journal Biology Letters, proved that people with water-wrinkled fingers were indeed faster at picking up wet marbles.
+
+So, as evolution would have it, our ancestors who were not as good at picking up marbles were less likely to be chosen as suitable mates and pass along their genes. Or, actually, the ones who weren't as good at hand fishing and clam digging and those sorts of things after their hands were all wet and slippery; they wouldn't thrive and reproduce. The prune-fingered people, meanwhile, flourished and feasted and were the eminently desirable.
+
+Our toes wrinkle in water, too; don't forget. (Did you forget about your toes?) The researchers deduce that toe wrinkling is, similarly, to help us get traction when we're walking/running on wet surfaces. Which is interesting, because we're still not that good at it.

test_docs/cbc_beiber_bodyguard_sue.txy

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+A former bodyguard for Justin Bieber is suing the pop superstar, seeking more than $420,000 in overtime and other wages and claiming the singer repeatedly struck him during an October confrontation.
+
+Moshe Benabou's lawsuit claims Bieber berated him and repeatedly punched him in the chest after a disagreement about how to handle a member of the Grammy-nominated singer's entourage. After he walked away, Bieber fired him, Benabou's lawsuit claims.
+
+Benabou also says he was mistakenly told that he wasn't entitled to receive overtime despite working 14 to 18 hour days between March 2011 and October 2012.
+
+An email message sent to Bieber's publicist was not immediately returned.
+
+Benabou is seeking unspecified damages on the assault and battery claims and $421,261 in unpaid overtime, vacation and other wage benefits.
+
+"For nearly two years Mr. Benabou devoted himself completely to ensuring Mr. Bieber's personal safety," Benabou's attorney, Ilan Heimanson, wrote in a statement. "Mr. Benabou deserved, as does any employee, to be treated with respect, dignity and in accordance with the law. Unfortunately, he was not. "
+
+Bieber's album Believe ranked No. 6 in 2012 sales with more than 1.3 million units sold.
+
+In October Los Angeles prosecutors declined to file charges against Bieber after finding insufficient evidence that he punched and kicked a photographer outside a movie theater near his home in Calabasas, Calif., a month earlier.

test_docs/cbc_first_nations_cheif_meet_harper.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,95 @@
+A meeting between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Assembly of First Nations chiefs is in question amid demands that the Governor General be present at the gathering.
+
+Questions over who will attend the meeting — and new demands about where it should be held — created confusion on the eve of the gathering called to discuss concerns about the relationship between the federal government and First Nations.
+
+Chiefs gathered at a meeting at the Delta hotel in Ottawa on Thursday evening, with some saying they will attend the meeting with the prime minister, but "many" saying they won't, Evan Solomon, host of CBC News Network's Power & Politics, reported via Twitter.
+
+"The meeting is up in the air," another Solomon tweet said at about 9:30 p.m. ET
+
+As chief after chief got up to announce support for Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence's stance that the Governor General must attend, Atleo eventually took the microphone to plea for unity. He admitted he had made mistakes and that the membership of the Assembly of First Nations was divided. What he left unsaid was whether any meeting with Harper would take place at all, or how he would proceed.
+
+
+"This is not a perfect organization and I am not a perfect person. I accept a share of responsibility and I have responded to criticisms from last January," Atleo told a rowdy crowded room of chiefs and delegates.
+
+"We need to continue to stand united — chiefs, delegates…. If we are to be divided at a moment like this, the governments will see that."
+
+He then left the conference hall, with insiders indicating he would work through the night with his executive in order to figure out the best way forward.
+
+Some of his allies insisted he would meet with Harper and cabinet ministers as planned on Friday afternoon — in private, in the Prime Minister's Office with a relatively small delegation of chiefs.
+
+"It is our intention to move forward with the meeting," said B.C. Regional Chief Jody Wilson-Raybould.
+
+Atleo himself suggested he would hold the meeting, and then push for a broader meeting on Jan. 24, and a commitment to hold broad, open meetings with chiefs at regular intervals.
+
+"We need them to commit to sit with you on a regular, ongoing basis, look you in the eye the way it was done in the treaty-making, in a sacred manner. And let's transform this relationship. Because our kids are dependent on every single one of us," he said.
+
+'Very dictatorial and unrelenting'
+Grand Chief Stan Louttit, of the Mushkegowuk territory that includes Attawapiskat First Nation, told Solomon on his program Thursday that the chiefs were united in the belief that the meeting would be off unless both Harper and Gov. Gen. David Johnston were in attendance.
+
+"That's what the chiefs debated this afternoon," Louttit said. "And there is unanimity on the floor from our meeting at the conference centre that we want both the Governor General and the prime minister at our meeting tomorrow."
+
+Manitoba chiefs said they would not attend Friday's meeting unless it was moved to the hotel.
+
+"Unfortunately, the prime minister has been very dictatorial and unrelenting in his position to control and set the agenda for this meeting," the Manitoba chiefs said in a release.
+
+Meanwhile, Harper's director of communications, Andrew MacDougall, said the government will stick with the plan for Harper to attend the working meeting at his office, and for the Governor General to host a separate ceremonial meeting at Rideau Hall Friday evening.
+
+Johnston had said that he wouldn't attend a working meeting on public policy, despite demands by some First Nations leaders, including Spence, that he be there in his role as the Queen's representative in Canada.
+
+Spence has limited her food intake for the past month, consuming only herbal tea and fish broth since Dec. 11. She says she will continue her protest until the meeting happens and said she wouldn't stop unless Johnston was at the meeting.
+
+Spence's fast may continue
+It's not clear yet whether a ceremonial meeting will meet those demands. Spence's spokesman, Danny Metatawabin, first told CBC News that the meeting with Johnston was a positive step, but then said if he isn't at the same meeting as Harper then it would be a failure.
+
+Spence has maintained Harper, Johnston, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and First Nations leaders must be in the same room, having discussions together. Louttit said on Power & Politics that Spence won't be attending.
+
+McGuinty has an unrelated news conference in Toronto Friday morning and then leaves for a trade mission to China.
+
+The working meeting is to be held at Langevin Block, the building that houses the Prime Minister's Office, and is closed to media, a spokeswoman for Harper said in an email.
+
+The meeting, if it goes ahead, will start at 1 p.m. ET with remarks by Harper and Atleo, with a plenary session from 1:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. to discuss the treaty relationship, aboriginal rights and economic development.
+
+Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Minister John Duncan and Treasury Board president Tony Clement will be at the plenary sessions.
+
+Harper and Atleo will "engage in a dialogue" about the outcomes of the plenary session from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.
+
+NDP Leader Tom Mulcair was to meet with 20 national and regional First Nations chiefs Thursday night at Stornoway, the residence of the Opposition leader. However, that meeting was delayed and eventually cancelled due to the evening meeting at the Delta.
+
+Spence will not be at that meeting.
+
+'Poverty is killing First Nations people'
+Earlier Thursday, the country's top chief said poverty is killing First Nations people, as he laid out goals for the meeting with the Harper.
+
+Atleo said the AFN has heard the voices of Idle No More activists calling for action.
+
+"We are absolute in our convictions and in our determination to achieve our rights," he said.
+
+Referring to the number of missing and murdered aboriginal women, Atleo's voice caught as he recalled going with a family to a morgue after a 16-year-old girl was killed.
+
+"This is what our people are saying. That poverty is killing our people. That the history of colonization and unilateral action on the part of governments will stop now," he said.
+
+Atleo, along with regional chiefs Jody Wilson-Raybould and Perry Bellegarde, laid out a number of specific requests, including treaty implementation, treaty enforcement and a new financial relationship with the Crown. Bellegarde says one funding formula is 19 years old and hasn't kept up with either inflation or the total First Nations population.
+
+Wilson-Raybould and Bellegarde both pointed to the need for a new division within the Prime Minister's Office or the Privy Council office to manage the policy changes they're asking for.
+
+"The second point we talked about is, again, lands and resources being unilaterally developed without our involvement. That creates poverty. That's not good for our country. We need to deal with that," Bellegarde said, recommending Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver should be working on that file with the AFN.
+
+'Poor in our own homelands'
+The chiefs also mentioned disputes over changes to environmental legislation the Conservative government made in its two omnibus budget implementation bills in 2012.
+
+"Our treaties were not meant to make us poor in our own homelands. But that's what we see," Bellegarde said.
+
+Wilson-Raybould said the Indian Act needs to be fundamentally changed.
+
+"Imposed solutions will not work," she said. "We have the solutions right across the country in terms of developing and extricating ourselves from the Indian Act."
+
+The meetings comes after nearly two months of Idle No More protests by First Nations people, as well as Spence's month-long hunger strike.
+
+'Nothing left to lose'
+First Nations people in Canada have "nothing left to lose," the grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs told reporters Thursday morning, pointing to the problems with lack of housing, unsafe drinking water and poor health in the community.
+
+Derek Nepinak said the Idle No More movement has enough people to "bring the Canadian economy to its knees."
+
+"It can stop Prime Minister Harper's resource development plan and his billion-dollar plan to develop resources in our ancestral territories. We have the warriors that are standing up now that are willing to go that far. So we're not here to make requests. We're here to demand attention and to demand an end to 140 years of colonial rule," Nepinak said.
+
+The Manitoba chiefs distributed a list of 10 treaty principles in advance, affirming their sovereignty and that Canada "has an ongoing obligation to fulfil the treaty according to the spirit and intent."

test_docs/cbc_macdonald_aljezeera_na.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,75 @@
+Most Westerners have no idea where N'Djamena is. Al Jazeera English operates a news bureau there (it's the capital of Chad).
+
+AJE also has correspondents in Juba, Diyarbakir, Harare, Khartoum, Nouakchott, Skopje, and about 65 other cities, including a North American metropolis all but ignored by big U.S. media: Toronto.
+
+The network, owned and operated by the Emirate of Qatar, no longer has anything to prove about the quality of its journalism. It has won all sorts of prestigious awards and broken all sorts of stories.
+
+It is now in 80 million homes worldwide, and is known in our business as the outfit that's always in places nobody else covers.
+
+Late last year, for example, as the rest of the English-language media were concentrating on the crisis in Egypt, AJE's Nazanine Moshiri was travelling with the M23 rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo, broadcasting live several times a day.
+
+That sort of thing has made the network a must-watch for agencies like the U.S. State Department, especially as Western networks and newspapers scale back, closing their foreign bureaus wholesale.
+
+But Americans with enough savvy to seek out AJE must do so on the internet. Because after more than six years of operation, the network remains effectively locked out of the American cable TV market.
+
+Last week, after the announcement that AJE had bought Al Gore's Current TV (for something like $500 million), and with it access to as many as 40 million American homes, Time Warner immediately announced it was dropping Current from its cable roster.
+
+The move was reminiscent of the Comcast decision not to carry AJE here when the network first launched in 2006.
+
+It's been a pattern. The country that, in the name of free speech, allows flag-burning, Ku Klux Klan marches and protests at military funerals by religious zealots hoisting "God hates fags" placards decided years ago that AJE represents the kind of speech it simply cannot tolerate.
+
+"It's insane that a country as important and as vibrant and diverse as the United States would have such a banana republic approach to news and information," says Tony Burman, the former CBC editor in chief who spent years as AJE's managing director, trying to win cable TV carriage in the U.S. market.
+
+"The fear-mongering has been surreal."
+
+Anti-American?
+AJE is widely available in Canada, albeit way up the dial on most cable outlets, and recently did a deal with Virgin Media in the U.K., which means it can be found on almost all the main British TV platforms.
+
+But from its inception, the network has faced a powerful self-interested corporate pushback here in the U.S.
+
+Employees of the English-language satellite news channel AJE, in the control room in Doha, Qatar. Now it has a toehold in the big U.S. market. (Fadi Al-Assaad / Reuters)
+After the Current TV sale was announced last week, Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly fulminated about such an asset going to "an anti-American network."
+
+Religious and political forces opposed it, too.
+
+Just as Canadian ambassadors spent years battling false rumours that the 9/11 attackers entered the U.S. from Canada, Burman spent much of his time here debunking ridiculous stories about AJE airing beheadings of American soldiers by al-Qaeda.
+
+The Bush administration, in particular, painted AJE and its Arabic-language parent, Al Jazeera, as little more than puppets for Osama bin Laden.
+
+That's always seemed a bit odd, given that Qatar has largely aligned itself with Washington's agenda of reform in the Arab world.
+
+Though it is true that Al Jazeera's Arabic-language mother ship has at times been a journalistic embarrassment.
+
+In 2008, Arabic Al Jazeera's Beirut bureau actually threw an on-air party for Samir Kuntar after his release by Israel in a prisoner swap. Kuntar, a self-styled freedom fighter from Lebanon, killed an Israeli man in front of his daughter in 1979, then bashed the little girl's skull in with a rock.
+
+The fact that Osama bin Laden chose the Arabic-language Al Jazeera for his first post-9/11 interview didn't help the network's image here in the U.S. either.
+
+(Ironically, Al Jazeera chose not to broadcast the interview, which amounted to little more than a sermon by bin Laden. Excerpts finally ran on CNN after al-Qaeda released its copy of the video, but Al Jazeera took the blame for airing it.)
+
+Al Jazeera English, though, is nothing like its Arabic sister network. Its standards and judgment are in line with Western journalistic tradition, although, like Fox News Channel and other cable networks here, AJE doesn't bother hiding its political bias.
+
+AJE is suspicious of American militarism, dubious about globalization and overtly sympathetic to poorer nations.
+
+Robert D. Kaplan of the Atlantic magazine, an authority on international security, calls this a "middle of the road, developing world viewpoint."
+
+It is also plainly pro-Palestinian, which has made AJE the target of one of Washington's more powerful interest groups.
+
+Storming the U.S. market
+"I think the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. works overtime to demean and defame Al Jazeera," says Burman. "And I think that they, in concert with some of the political forces, have basically persuaded many of the cable companies that there will be a backlash from viewers if they dare carry Al Jazeera."
+
+That has not been the case in the handful of small markets where Burman managed to get Al Jazeera English on the air: Washington, DC; Toledo, Ohio; and Burlington, Vermont. In fact, in Vermont, there was a pro-AJE backlash against the network's detractors.
+
+The emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, a leader, many say, with the strategic vision and wealth to be a player in the Middle East. (Wissam Nassar / Reuters)
+Burman, and many others here, believe that Al Jazeera English, with its vast network of correspondents reporting from places that most Western news outlets simply ignore, could only be a welcome change from the incessant yammering of the cable-TV talking-head echo chamber.
+
+So the network plows ahead. Time Warner may have dropped it, but Verizon and others still carry Current TV, which AJE intends to reinvent as "Al Jazeera America," expanding its coverage and staff in this country.
+
+It's a big, costly move, and in their offices AJE journalists are arguing over the best way to storm the American market.
+
+Slogans are being drawn up, marketing schemes hatched.
+
+An old colleague of mine (there are no end of Canadians at AJE) thinks the key is to consciously look and sound as starkly different as possible from the rest of the American pack.
+
+"I'd put up a picture of [reality star] Kim Kardashian," he said, "with a voiceover saying 'Take a look at her. Because this is the last time you will ever see her on this station. Welcome to Al Jazeera.'"
+
+That's a pitch I'd buy.

test_docs/cbc_macdonald_obama_tax_cliff.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,79 @@
+Amid all the post-mortems to the self-inflicted wound known as the fiscal cliff, my favourite bit was the exchange at the White House last week between Congress's two biggest antagonists, John Boehner and Harry Reid.
+
+Reid is the starchy, pitiless Democrat who basically runs the U.S. Senate. Just about nobody considers him a nice guy.
+
+Boehner is Speaker of the House of Representatives, and he, by most accounts, is felt to be a nice guy.
+
+He's most famous here in Washington for crying in public, which is sort of understandable, given his other responsibility: running a Republican caucus that treats him like an annoying substitute teacher and forces him into humiliating public climbdowns.
+
+Anyway, as Politico tells it, Reid and Boehner encountered one another in the White House lobby during the intense post-Christmas negotiations to "avoid the cliff."
+
+Boehner pointed at Reid and suggested, in explicit terms, that he go perform an anatomically impossible act on himself. Reid, no doubt highly entertained, asked for clarity, and Boehner repeated the suggestion, then turned his back and walked away.
+
+When you think about it, that episode distills modern Washington to its essence: Congress has become so indifferent to compromise in the larger national interest, so ideologically calcified, that deliberations on crucial public policy have come down to the big middle finger in the White House lobby.
+
+Democracy in action
+Of course, apologists for both parties are trying hard to extract something more optimistic from the short-term non-solution that at least avoided raising most people's taxes.
+
+The New Year's Eve fix, they claim, was democracy in action.
+
+Republican House Speaker John Boehner, treated like a substitute teacher. (Associated Press)
+Democrats are praising President Barack Obama for fulfilling his election promise. Republicans say they put the public interest first, and prevented much worse liberal tax-and-spend excess.
+
+Cable TV hosts, meanwhile, posed idiotic "snapper" questions to their endless political panels: "We only have 30 seconds left. Winners and losers?"
+
+Well, the ugly answer is this: the loser in the past week was sensible government.
+
+Having created a potential economic disaster in order to force themselves to do something about what everyone agrees is out-of-control debt and spending, Congress, in the end, did almost nothing about the country's addiction to borrowing, which was the original point of the whole exercise.
+
+What happened was that everybody got together and decided to do as little as possible to get re-elected.
+
+Republicans reluctantly agreed to soak the very rich, expressing their disgust at having been "cornered" and "bullied" into doing it by Obama.
+
+And Obama, who talked endlessly during the election about a balanced approach, now seems to have abandoned the notion of serious cuts to government.
+
+The tough decisions about spending, particularly how to deal with unaffordable government entitlements and subsidies to which voters have become addicted, were postponed once again.
+
+How serious is this? Well, Americans now carry more government debt per capita than Greeks (though, admittedly, a greater capacity to deal with it).
+
+And soon enough there will be another crisis, another mountain, or cliff, or pool of quicksand, or some other inventive geographical metaphor.
+
+The debt ceiling — the U.S. government's legislated borrowing limit — was reached this week.
+
+Treasury officials can do some creative juggling to keep paying the bills for a few more months, but eventually, there'll be another showdown in Congress about that, too.
+
+Not enough swing
+Of course when that happens, everyone will profess fatigue with the whole process again.
+
+Pundits will perpetuate the notion that this is not really what the people want at all. The American public, apparently, is a much more sensible lot, who really only want compromise.
+
+It's tempting to buy into that idea, that contemporary Washington is an artificial construct created despite, rather than in response to, public desire — that partisan gerrymandering and special-interest spending have hijacked the people's Congress, thwarting the popular will.
+
+Senate Majority leader Harry Reid. He got the votes, but in the end it wasn't his deal to make.
+The dismal reality, though, is that American voters effectively demanded the gridlock in Washington.
+
+As Nate Silver, the New York Times data maven, pointed out recently, a close look at November's election results reveals a nation more polarized than it has been in nearly a century, with far fewer swing states where people vote according to issues and solutions, rather than out of blind party loyalty.
+
+Now, I'm not one for lecturing anybody about how Canadians do things.
+
+Frankly, we're probably nowhere near as collectively reasonable as we like to think we are.
+
+But increasingly, the difference between our systems of government is that Ottawa can actually get things done.
+
+In the mid-1990s, Jean Chretien and Paul Martin realized Canada was in the same spiral of debt and spending that the U.S. now finds itself and took the necessary remedial measures.
+
+They cut spending, raised taxes, and ramped up the contributions that support public pensions.
+
+Canadians grumbled at first, and pretty seriously, at least for a time.
+
+But within a few years, fiscal health had returned and Canada was soon being lauded as a hemispheric rock star as far as its economy was concerned.
+
+That persists to this day, while the U.S. elevated can-kicking its problems down the road to official public policy.
+
+Even the United States, though, cannot change the laws of mathematics.
+
+This country could do the sensible thing. It could raise taxes a bit on everyone, and make the obvious cuts to spending, which is what Obama campaigned on. It could make voters pay for the entitlements they love.
+
+Make no mistake, though: a reckoning is coming. And if Congress doesn't act sensibly, and responsibly, then the only likely alternative will be to print a mind-boggling amount of money to cover the country's debts, beggaring everyone else in the process.
+
+If that happens, then America will be effectively telling the world what John told Harry at the White House.

test_docs/cbc_navy_spys_wife_recalls.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,64 @@
+The ex-wife of the Canadian navy intelligence officer who pleaded guilty to espionage charges in October says that “the Jeff that I married is not the Jeff that did this. It blows my mind that somebody can betray a whole country, ‘cause one marriage failed.”
+
+In a documentary that airs Friday on CBC-TV, the fifth estate has an exclusive interview with Jennifer Delisle, the ex-wife of Jeffrey Delisle, a military intelligence specialist who walked into the Russian Embassy in July 2007 and offered his services as a spy. He continued his espionage work until his arrest in Halifax in January 2012.
+
+The fifth estate: The Imperfect Spy
+When Jennifer and Jeffrey first met 20 years earlier in Lower Sackville, a suburb of Halifax, she was the rebellious teen and he was the straight arrow, known for his integrity. “He was a very black and white kind of guy, and he didn't like people who did black things, so he made me look and strive for higher things,” she said in an interview with the fifth estate’s Linden MacIntyre.
+
+“He was the good guy. He was the kind that you looked for. Well, I remember quoting to one of my friends, [I’m] going to date him for a week or two because he's not really my type right now. I'm still into a party mode. But you know, when I want to marry somebody, that might be the guy I look for.”
+
+Rocky marriage
+Delisle had grown up in a family with a military tradition, and in 1996 he became a reservist specializing in intelligence before joining the Royal Canadian Navy in 2001 and then moving to defence intelligence in Ottawa in 2006.
+
+Sub-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle leaves provincial court in Halifax on Oct. 10, 2012. He will be sentenced on espionage charges later this month. (Andrew Vaughan/Canadian Press)
+Jennifer and Jeffrey had married in 1997, a union that produced two girls and then two boys in quick succession, but also increasing discord.
+
+“Our marriage wasn't very good,” Jennifer told the fifth estate. “A lot of it stemmed from computer using. He played a lot of games…. for a very long time. So he lived in his own little world.”
+
+Jennifer said that she became “very unhappy…. I would nag him. Used to leave little notes on the computer that said, you know, ‘How about dating the other woman tonight,’ meaning me. Meaning that his computer was his first love…. We talked a lot about his computer addiction.”
+
+Her husband was apologetic, she said, but did little to change his behaviour. When he discovered his wife was having an affair, however, he was devastated.
+
+Watch
+Watch the fifth estate documentary The Imperfect Spy on Friday. It airs on CBC-TV at 9 p.m. (9:30 in Newfoundland and Labrador).
+
+During the interrogation following his arrest, Delisle said “I grew up to a strict moral code. Always do the right thing. Always do the right thing. Dependable Jeff. Jeff... Jeff... Jeff... And I get betrayed. My wife told me that she didn't love me for 19 years. She saw me as security. It killed me.”
+
+Delisle said he thought of suicide, but couldn’t bear the thought of leaving his children. “So I committed professional suicide. That's what I did, professional suicide,” he said.
+
+“The day that I flipped sides? I walked right into the Russian Embassy ... and that was the last day of Jeff Delisle.”
+
+Jennifer finds his rationalization difficult to accept. “All marriages have problems, and I think if you were to blame ... what he's done on infidelity, I think that's a very weak excuse. Every Canadian might be going to sell secrets somewhere. I think it's a very poor excuse. And not one I think that many people would stand behind.”
+
+Common profile for a spy
+David Major, a former head of counter-intelligence for the FBI, told the fifth estate that Delisle’s excuse is a familiar one. “That’s a very common theme we’ve seen from many spies, to make that same statement.… ‘I was at the lowest of my point and therefore I chose this route’ …. People don’t commit espionage because they’re happy, it’s because they are at somewhat of a life crisis. What we call a profound fear of failure as personally defined by them.”
+
+In 2007, when Delisle began working for the Russian spy agency, he was an army sergeant based in Ottawa, but during the following years he acquired a university degree, a commission as a naval officer and a beefed-up security classification, all without attracting attention.
+
+In August 2011, Delisle joined HMCS Trinity, a top secret intelligence facility at the naval dockyard in Halifax that tracks vessels entering and exiting Canadian waters via satellites, drones and underwater devices. The centre is a multinational base with access to secret data from NATO countries and the intelligence alliance known as the “Five Eyes,” comprising Canada, the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Delisle had full access to the top secret information.
+
+Hugh Williamson, a retired navy lieutenant who worked at Trinity until four years ago, specialized in the same threat assessment role assigned to Delisle.
+
+“He's got a job that gives him access to a number of systems that have classified information on Canada, on its allies, on military operations, on police operations, on a number of different things…. And since apparently he was downloading large quantities of documents and passing them out to the Russians there would be an awful lot there which would be of considerable interest.”
+
+Easy theft of secrets
+Despite the sensitivity of the work, Delisle found it simple to steal secrets. He copied files from a secure computer to a floppy disk, which he would take to an open computer to transfer files to a USB key. After work, he would take the USB key home, log on to a private email account on a server based in Egypt and leave the files there as a draft document. His Russian handlers shared the password for the account and could download the files.
+
+For 4½ years, Delisle was paid $3,000 a month transferred through Money Mart and an Irish intermediary, never meeting face to face with his Russian handlers.
+
+In 2011, however, around the time he moved to Trinity, he was instructed to find a pretext for a trip to Rio de Janeiro. Delisle was still grieving over his failed marriage. He was overweight, diabetic and supporting three children.
+
+The trip would prove disastrous for Delisle. In Rio, he met with his Russian handler, who gave him $50,000 in cash. According to Delisle, he was also told his role would soon change to that of a “pigeon,” meaning he would become a contact among other spies active in the Northern Hemisphere.
+
+At some point during his journey that included stopovers in the U.S., he drew the attention of U.S. immigration officials. They alerted the FBI, which tipped off Canadian authorities.
+
+Game over
+A period of intense surveillance followed that monitored every moment Delisle touched a computer. Files that had been planted were intercepted after he tried to send them to his Russian handlers.
+
+On Jan. 13, 2012, RCMP officers arrested Delisle near his home in Bedford, N.S., and charged him with breach of trust and giving secret information to a foreign entity. He pleaded guilty to those charges in October and a sentencing hearing is set for later this month.
+
+Even now, Delisle’s ex-wife finds it difficult to conceive of him as a spy.
+
+“I don't think you picture anybody doing that. Betraying your country. Betraying your family. Betraying your loved ones. I mean, OK, so you're really angry at your wife. You want to get back at her. So you bring down all of Canada? And the U.S.? The UN?
+
+“Doesn't seem to make sense to me.”

test_docs/hn_atlantic_watson_taught_urban_dicionary.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+Humans talk funny. We invent words. We smash words together, tear them apart, abbreviate them one way, then another. Which is great and fun, if you're a human. Not so great if you are a machine or the kind of human who programs machines to understand language.
+
+And so, when IBM's famous artificial intelligence, Watson, he/she/it of Jeopardy-winning fame, was in development, its head researcher had a great idea. Humans created this repository of slang, The Urban Dictionary. For example, today on the site, we learn that 'healthy gas' is "the gas (fart) produced from a person who has eaten healthy foods like cabbage, beans, broccolli, grains, or other high fiber, high carbohydrate foods." 
+
+Brown realized that this formalization of informal language might be a great way for Watson to understand the way real people communicate. So, he and his team, fed the whole thing into their AI. 
+
+But one problem. Informal language has a tendency to be dirty, nasty language. Its insults and cuss words, new names for gross old things, old names for gross new things, etc. And so, we learn from Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram, they had to delete all that human messiness from Watson's memory. 
+
+Watson couldn't distinguish between polite language and profanity -- which the Urban Dictionary is full of. Watson picked up some bad habits from reading Wikipedia as well. In tests it even used the word "bullshit" in an answer to a researcher's query.
+
+Ultimately, Brown's 35-person team developed a filter to keep Watson from swearing and scraped the Urban Dictionary from its memory.

test_docs/hn_gigacom_nokia_decrypts_https.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+Nokia has confirmed reports that its Xpress Browser decrypts data that flows through HTTPS connections – that includes the connections set up for banking sessions, encrypted email and more. However, it insists that there’s no need for users to panic because it would never access customers’ encrypted data.
+
+The confirmation-slash-denial comes after security researcher Gaurang Pandya, who works for Unisys Global Services in India, detailed on his personal blog how browser traffic from his Series 40 ‘Asha’ phone was getting routed via Nokia’s servers. So far, so Opera Mini: after all, the whole point of using a proxy browser such as this is to compress traffic so you can save on data and thereby cash. This is particularly handy for those on constricted data plans or pay-by-use data, as those using the low-end Series 40 handsets on which the browser is installed by default (it used to be known as the ‘Nokia Browser for Series 40′) are likely to be.
+
+However, it was Pandya’s second post on the subject that caused some alarm. Unlike the first, which looked at general traffic, the Wednesday post specifically examined Nokia’s treatment of HTTPS traffic. It found that such traffic was indeed also getting routed via Nokia’s servers. Crucially, Pandya said that Nokia had access to this data in unencrypted form:
+
+“From the tests that were preformed, it is evident that Nokia is performing Man In The Middle Attack for sensitive HTTPS traffic originated from their phone and hence they do have access to clear text information which could include user credentials to various sites such as social networking, banking, credit card information or anything that is sensitive in nature.”
+tweet this
+Pandya pointed out how this potentially clashes with Nokia’s privacy statement, which claims: “we do not collect any usernames or passwords or any related information on your purchase transactions, such as your credit card number during your browsing sessions”.
+
+So, does it clash?
+
+Nokia came back today with a statement on the matter, in which it stressed that it takes the privacy and security of its customers and their data very seriously, and reiterated the point of the Xpress Browser’s compression capabilities, namely so that “users can get faster web browsing and more value out of their data plans”.
+
+“Importantly, the proxy servers do not store the content of web pages visited by our users or any information they enter into them,” the company said. “When temporary decryption of HTTPS connections is required on our proxy servers, to transform and deliver users’ content, it is done in a secure manner.
+“Nokia has implemented appropriate organizational and technical measures to prevent access to private information. Claims that we would access complete unencrypted information are inaccurate.”
+tweet this
+To paraphrase: we decrypt your data, but trust us, we don’t peek. Which is, in a way, fair enough. After all, they need to decrypt the data in order to de-bulk it.
+
+The issue here seems to be around how Nokia informs – or fails to inform – its customers of what’s going on. For example, look at Opera. The messaging around Opera Mini is pretty clear: the browser’s FAQs spell out how it routes traffic. Although you can find out about the Xpress Browser’s equivalent functionality with a bit of online searching, it’s far less explicit to the average user. And this is particularly unfortunate given that the browser is installed by default — people won’t necessarily choose it based on those data-squeezing chops.
+
+And it looks like Nokia belatedly recognizes that fact. The statement continued:
+
+“We aim to be completely transparent on privacy practices. As part of our policy of continuous improvement we will review the information provided in the mobile client in case this can be improved.”
+tweet this
+The moral of the story is that those who want absolute security in their mobile browsing should probably steer clear of browsers that compress to cut down on data. Even if Nokia isn’t tapping into that data – and there is no reason to suspect that it is – the very existence of that feature will be a turn-off for the paranoid, and reasonably so. And that’s why Nokia should be up-front about such things.
+
+UPDATE: A kind soul has reminded me that, unlike Xpress Browser and Opera Mini, two other services that also do the compression thing leave HTTPS traffic unperturbed, namely Amazon with its Silk browser and Skyfire. This is arguably how things should be done, although it does of course mean that users don’t get speedier loading and so on on HTTPS pages.

test_docs/hn_safari_released.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
+During the early development of Safari, I didn’t just worry about leaking our secret project through Apple’s IP address or our browser’s user agent string. It also concerned me that curious gawkers on the outside would notice who I was hiring at Apple.
+
+Other than a bit part in a documentary about Netscape that aired on PBS, I wasn’t known to anyone but a few dozen other geeks in The Valley. Of course, several of those folks were aware I was now at Apple and working on some project I wouldn’t say anything about. And it doesn’t take many people in this town to snowball a bit of idle speculation.
+
+I found out later that Andy Hertzfeld, an Apple veteran who I worked with at Eazel, had figured it all out by the time I showed up for my first day to work on the browser on June 25, 2001. Andy was very insightful that way. But thankfully he was also quiet about it at the time.
+
+Hiring Darin Adler, also ex-Apple and ex-Eazel, in the Spring of 2002 was likely visible to others in the industry since he was much more well known than me. But because Darin had never worked on a dedicated Web browser like I had, no one made the connection.
+
+However, when I hired Dave Hyatt in July 2002, then guesses started flying fast.
+
+While at Netscape, Dave built the Chimera (now known as Camino) browser for Mac OS X and co-created the project that would later become Firefox. Both of these applications were based on the Mozilla Gecko layout engine on which Dave also worked. He was a true celebrity in the Web browser world, having his hands in just about every Mozilla project.
+
+So, during the Summer of 2002, several bloggers and tech websites speculated that Dave must be bringing Chimera to the Mac. Except that Chimera was already a Mac application and didn’t need to be ported. So what the hell was Dave doing at Apple? Building another Gecko-based Mac browser? No one knew. And none of this made much sense. Which is probably why the rumors subsided so quickly.
+
+But people would remember all of this when Safari debuted at Macworld in San Francisco on January 7, 2003. And at least one of them would remember it at full volume while Steve Jobs was on stage making that announcement.
+
+Until I watched that video I found and posted of the Macworld keynote, I had completely forgotten what else was announced that day. Which is pretty sad considering I saw Steve rehearse the whole thing at least four times.
+
+But you have to realize I was totally focused on Safari. And Scott Forstall, my boss, wanted me at those rehearsals in case something went wrong with it.
+
+There’s nothing that can fill your underwear faster than seeing your product fail during a Steve Jobs demo.
+
+One of my concerns at the time was network reliability. So, I brought Ken Kocienda, the first Safari engineer, with me to troubleshoot since he wrote so much of our networking code. If necessary, Ken could also diagnose and duct tape any other part of Safari too. He coined one of our team aphorisms, “If it doesn’t fit, you’re not shoving hard enough.”
+
+Ken and I started at Apple on the same day so, technically, he’s the only original Safari team member I didn’t hire. But because we both worked at Eazel together, I knew that Ken was a world-class propellor-head and insisted Forstall assign him to my team — essentially a requirement for me taking the job.
+
+Most of the time during those rehearsals, Ken and I had nothing to do except sit in the then empty audience and watch The Master Presenter at work — crafting his keynote. What a privilege to be a spectator during that process. At Apple, we were actually all students, not just spectators. When I see other companies clumsily announce products these days, I realize again how much the rest of the world lost now that Steve is gone.
+
+At one rehearsal, Safari hung during Steve’s demo — unable to load any content. Before my pants could load any of its own, Ken discovered the entire network connection had failed. Nothing we could do. The IT folks fixed the problem quickly and set up a redundant system. But I still worried that it might happen again when it really mattered.
+
+On the day of actual keynote, only a few of us from the Safari team were in the audience. Employee passes are always limited at these events for obvious reasons. But we did have great seats, just a few rows from the front — you didn’t want to be too close in case something really went wrong.
+
+Steve started the Safari presentation with, “So, buckle up.” And that’s what I wished I could do then — seatbelt myself down. Then he defined one of our product goals as, “Speed. Speed.” So, I tensed up. Not that I didn’t agree, of course. I just knew what was coming soon:
+
+Demo time.
+
+And for the entire six minutes and 32 seconds that Steve used Safari on stage, I don’t remember taking a single breath. I was thinking about that network failure during rehearsal and screaming inside my head, “Stay online, stay online!” We only had one chance to make a first impression.
+
+Of course, Steve, Safari and the network performed flawlessly. I shouldn’t have worried.
+
+Then it was back to slides and Steve talking about how we built it. “We based Safari on an HTML rendering engine that is open source.” And right then is when everybody else remembered all those rumors from the Summer about Dave Hyatt bringing Chimera to Apple.
+
+But I chose the engine we used — with my team’s and my management chain’s support, of course — a year before Dave joined the project. Dave thought it was a great decision too, once he arrived. But that engine wasn’t Gecko, the code inside Chimera.
+
+It was KHTML. Specifically KHTML and KJS — the code inside KDE’s Konqueror Web browser on Linux. After the keynote was over, I sent this email to the KDE team to thank them and introduce ourselves. I did it right from where I was sitting too, once they turned the WiFi back on.
+
+You can argue whether KHTML was the right decision — go ahead, after 10 years it doesn’t faze me anymore. I’ll detail my reasons in a later post. Spoiler alert: I don’t hate Gecko.
+
+But back to Steve’s presentation.
+
+Everyone was clapping that Apple embraced open source. Happy, happy, happy. And they were just certain what was coming next. Then Steve moved a new slide onto the screen. With only one word, “KHTML” — six-foot-high white letters on a blue background.
+
+If you listen to that video I posted, notice that no one applauds here. Why? I’m guessing confusion and complete lack of recognition.
+
+What you also can’t hear on the video is someone about 15 to 20 rows behind where we were sitting — obviously expecting the word “Gecko” up there — shout at what seemed like the top of his lungs:
+
+“WHAT THE FUCK!?”
+
+KHTML may have been a bigger surprise than Apple doing a browser at all. And that moment was glorious. We had punk’d the entire crowd.

test_docs/hn_safari_team_hello.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,66 @@
+Hi,
+
+I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser 
+built upon KHTML and KJS.  I'm sending you this email to thank you for 
+making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my 
+development team.  I also wish to explain why and how we've used your 
+excellent technology.  It's important that you know we're committed to 
+open source and contributing our changes, now and in the future, back 
+to you, the original developers.  Hopefully this will begin a dialogue 
+among ourselves for the benefit of both of our projects.
+
+I've "cc"-ed my team on this email so you know their names and contact 
+information.  Perhaps you already recognize some of those names.  Back 
+in '98 I was one of the people who took Mozilla open source.  David 
+Hyatt is not only the originator of the Chimera web browser project but 
+also the inventor of XBL.  Darin Adler is the former lead of the 
+Nautilus file manager.  Darin, Maciej Stachowiak, John Sullivan, Ken 
+Kocienda, and I are all Eazel veterans.
+
+The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web 
+browser on Mac OS X.  When we were evaluating technologies over a year 
+ago, KHTML and KJS stood out.  Not only were they the basis of an 
+excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also 
+less than 140,000 lines of code.  The size of your code and ease of 
+development within that code made it a better choice for us than other 
+open source projects.  Your clean design was also a plus.  And the 
+small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup 
+performance as you can see reflected in the data at 
+http://www.apple.com/safari/ .
+
+How did we do it?  As you know, KJS is very portable and independent.  
+The Sherlock team is already using it on Mac OS X in the framework my 
+team prepared called JavaScriptCore.  But because KHTML requires other 
+components from KDE and Qt, we wrote our own adapter library called KWQ 
+(and pronounced "quack") that replaces these other components.  KHTML 
+and KWQ have been encapsulated in a framework called WebCore.  We've 
+also made significant enhancements, bug fixes, and performance 
+improvements to KHTML and KJS.
+
+Both WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which account for a little over half 
+the code in Safari, are being released as open source today.  They 
+should be available at 
+http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webcore/ very soon.  Also, 
+we'll be sending you another email soon which details our changes and 
+additions to KHTML and KJS.  I hope the detailed list in that email 
+will help you understand what we've done a little better.  We'd also 
+like to send this information to the appropriate KDE mailing list.  
+Please advise us on which one to use.
+
+We look forward to your comments.  We'd also like to speak to you and 
+we'd be happy to set up a conference call at our expense for this 
+purpose.
+
+Thank you again for making KHTML and KJS.
+
+Please forward this email to any contributor whom I may have missed.
+
+-- 
+Don Melton
+Safari Engineering Manager
+Apple Computer
+
+P.S. -- I'm sending you this email while attending MacWorld exposition 
+so it may take myself and my staff several hours before we can respond 
+to email.  My apologies in advance.
+

test_docs/hn_spacecom_einstien_right_space_time_smooth.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+Space-time is smooth rather than foamy, a new study suggests, scoring a possible victory for Einstein over some quantum theorists who came after him.
+
+In his general theory of relativity, Einstein described space-time as fundamentally smooth, warping only under the strain of energy and matter. Some quantum-theory interpretations disagree, however, viewing space-time as being composed of a froth of minute particles that constantly pop into and out of existence.
+
+It appears Albert Einstein may have been right yet again.
+
+
+A team of researchers came to this conclusion after tracing the long journey three photons took through intergalactic space. The photons were blasted out by an intense explosion known as a gamma-ray burst about 7 billion light-years from Earth. They finally barreled into the detectors of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009, arriving just a millisecond apart.
+
+Their dead-heat finish strongly supports the Einsteinian view of space-time, researchers said. The wavelengths of gamma-ray burst photons are so small that they should be able to interact with the even tinier "bubbles" in the quantum theorists' proposed space-time foam.
+
+If this foam indeed exists, the three protons should have been knocked around a bit during their epic voyage. In such a scenario, the chances of all three reaching the Fermi telescope at virtually the same time are very low, researchers said.
+
+So the new study is a strike against the foam's existence as currently imagined, though not a death blow.
+
+"If foaminess exists at all, we think it must be at a scale far smaller than the Planck length, indicating that other physics might be involved," study leader Robert Nemiroff, of Michigan Technological University, said in a statement. (The Planck length is an almost inconceivably short distance, about one trillionth of a trillionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom.)
+
+"There is a possibility of a statistical fluke, or that space-time foam interacts with light differently than we imagined," added Nemiroff, who presented the results Wednesday (Jan. 9) at the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, Calif.
+
+If the study holds up, the implications are big, researchers said.
+
+"If future gamma-ray bursts confirm this, we will have learned something very fundamental about our universe," Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University said in statement.

test_docs/wev_bringing_future_back_from_dead.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+In the new science-fiction film I saw a couple of weeks ago, there’s a funny scene where a woman is trying to make her car work. The car comes with handprint recognition instead of a regular lock, and so she has to spend half a minute awkwardly splaying her hand on the driver’s-side window, trying to get the goddamn thing to find her print and open the car. Eventually, the car relents and lets her in.
+
+For her second trick, she has to get the car to start. No key, see? The driving system uses facial recognition to start the car, just as some Android phones today will unlock themselves on "seeing" their owner’s faces. However, it would appear that, on the day she set up the facial recognition system, she was wearing a little eyeshadow and a little lipgloss. Because the car doesn’t recognise the fresh-faced girl sitting there on this summer’s day, she has to reach under the armrest to fish out a little lipgloss and a little eyeshadow and try again. Just to get the car to start.
+
+Because the future tends to arrive a little bit broken. We have workarounds for everything, because very few things turn up perfectly functional.
+
+Which isn’t something you tend to see science fiction focusing on much. But then this wasn’t a traditional SF film. The film, A Digital Tomorrow, produced by Nicolas Nova of the Near Future Laboratory and colleagues at the Media Design Program in Pasadena, was a design fiction.
+
+
+
+A design fiction is a short video, usually issued by a practise specialising in user interaction, created to illustrate possible futures in the social technology space. Literally, a fiction about design. This is where science fiction lives now.
+
+Science fiction’s been in a bad way for some time. The present condition develops too quickly for near-future SF to remain near-future by the time it’s actually hit print. Publication schedules can easily render a concept antique. Consequently, that part of the field’s all but abandoned: unless you’re a full-bore neophile like Charlie Stross or Cory Doctorow, or a word-artist like Lauren Beukes, you don’t want to chance it.
+
+Hence, some people started talking about the death of science fiction: the loss of socially-aware work about what might be around the corner, a lack of relevance or relatable characters. Science fiction, which in many ways has been the incontinent mental patient in the basement of Modernism, was rarely big on character and art in any case. Pick up any book by the “acknowledged masters” and you’ll usually find six plots in search of a character.
+
+User Interface, however, is in a sense all about the characters. All about the people. And, as in A Digital Tomorrow, has things both speculative and critical to say about the approach of the next New Normal. In the way that core science fiction, which acts as social fiction, speaks to the potentials of the present and the strange weather of the future.
+
+And a lot of this stuff does have the authentic chill of the weird, in a similar mode to old black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who with Cybermen stalking through East London must have had. The Wrong operating across the space of the Real. It operates exactly as science fiction should.
+
+It’s easy to believe science fiction’s dead. It’s hard to find in the bookstores, the cinemas peddle fairytale crap dressed up as SF and TV’s record is spotty at best. But it turns out it’s alive, and being made in the offices of people who actually build the near future for a living. Which, like the best science fiction, is something you wouldn’t necessarily have predicted.

test_docs/wev_death_fun_politics.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+There has long been a notion abroad that positions of authority should be given to the best-qualified people who don't want them, as the job of "ruler", like "censor", does not necessarily attract the best kind of human being. That would, of course, kill the inherent black comedy in politics-watching. The creatures who fight and kick and bite for the right to fuck with our lives tend to be grotesques, and serve as warnings. Warnings we never heed, of course, because we end up voting something in from that shallow pool of eels every time.
+
+But, every now and then, there comes a period where that pool gets drained, and we find ourselves dealing with the dregs.
+
+I actually find myself weirdly nostalgic for the authentic monsters of politics. Even the sly, hollow hustling of Tony Blair would be preferable to the callow bafflement of Nick Clegg, the unnaturally shiny forehead and beta-male posturing of David Cameron, and the... well, whatever Ed Miliband is. There's Vince Cable, whom lots of people seem to like the idea of, but his presence, unfortunately, is that of Gravedigger #2 in one of the less successful Hammer Horror films.
+
+Over the water, Mitt Romney doesn't even have the facility to be slippery. He just staggers down the corridor of ideology like a cheap drunk, bumping into the walls. And President Obama isn't even a tragic hero in the mode of Jimmy Carter, who struggled mightily (with himself, as much as anything else) and fell before the eerie charm of Ronald Reagan. I can admire the man's intellect and general beliefs (or "values", which is the season's buzzword) while recognising that his main mode of operation is as a chilly functionary unwilling to take the big fights all the way.
+
+It's kind of awful to contrast him, with, say, Lyndon Johnson, a man so frightening that to this day some people still believe the legend about him skull-fucking John Kennedy's dead head during the flight back from Dallas. Washingtonians spoke of "The Johnson Treatment", where they would discover that Johnson knew everything about them and beat their minds into submission with a welter of promises, debts and threats. Johnson blithely destroyed South American democracies, almost started World War III a couple of times, drove civil rights through, became the first President to cause the arrest of Klan members in a century, and threw the '68 election to Richard Nixon. He was clearly unbalanced and lived to intimidate people. He was interesting. Democrats today just can't compare.
+
+Similarly, the smarmy Cameron, who wears a suit and blue tie like a stiff political costume he doesn't quite fill out, is as nothing compared even to the fundamentally decent John Major, a man who walked through more political massacres unscathed, as housecreature to the demented Margaret Thatcher, than probably any living politician. He cultivated the image of the "grey man", to be sure, but you can also be quite sure that an experienced politician knows that the recording equipment is on when he tells a newscaster about how he intends to "crucify" the "bastards" in his own cabinet. Even Gordon Brown plainly had a brain like a bucket of lizards being sprayed with petrol.
+
+You'll notice I'm only glancing at the famous ones, the genuine criminals and mental cases. When you, as a powerful politician, are not as interesting as John Major, well... these are the days of the dregs. On both sides of the Atlantic now, all major political parties occupy a boggy centre-right space, terrified that a turn to the left denotes weakness and smashed by public opinion when they try to dive much further to the right. Given the sort of people who crave power, it is a miserable indictment that not only do our current managers not have the courage to do sweeping good works, but that they also lack the black spine for acts of authentic pure fucking evil.
+
+It is a sad day, and an insidious thing, when our political leaders aren't even worth burning.

test_docs/wev_print_your_own_penis.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@
+Somewhere, in some gilded bunker of the 1 percent, a very old, very rich man is laying plans to print himself a new cock.  Perhaps one with cameras in. And maybe a gun.
+
+3D printing’s been around for a little while now, and it's improving in leaps and bounds. On one end of the scale, I was talking to someone from a very famous special effects studio the other week, who was telling me they now have the facility to print cars.  One of their wizards took a current-day standard 3D printer (which tend to look like dodgy breadmakers), took it apart to see how it worked, and then used it to print the parts to make a massively larger 3D printer, which he then used to print off a car. Street-furniture set-dressing for movies.
+
+On the other end of the scale, home 3D printers like the Makerbot Replicator now cost twelve hundred quid and can crank out several thousand different objects. It’s a start. (A cheaper machine, the Stratasys, was recently used to print off a gun, after all.)
+
+A start that led to a lot of other people thinking about what else could be printed. NASA have been developing something they call a “bioreactor” since the 1980s, wanting to supply long-haul astronauts with the onboard ability to perform skin and bone grafts by cloning and growing tissue. This has been developed into the idea of printing meat. Printed meat would be ethical meat, as nothing has to die in order to make it. The one drawback being that cultured meats of any kind tend to have textural issues: they’ve not been stuck to anything alive that can flex and secrete into it, so they’re kind of limp and nasty and may have to be artificially “exercised” by mechanical systems or electroshock therapy. A fine printed steak would have convulsed under electrical torture many hundreds of times before it reached your plate.
+
+I don’t actually have a problem with that, but I am a full-on omnivore who is looking forward to being able to print off dolphin-and-mastodon sandwiches. You can, however, understand the reticence of those who gave up meat for ethical reasons being served a pork chop that’s been worked on a rack and then electrocuted for your pleasure.  
+
+From bioreactors and printed meat, the obvious next step is printed organs. In 2011, on stage at TED, one Dr Anthony Atala printed a human kidney out in front of the audience. It wasn’t “working”, as such: it was structurally correct, but missing the fine tracery of blood vessels that any human organ requires to operate. A year later, Massachussetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania cracked the printing of circulatory architecture using sugar.  
+
+(They printed it with a RepRap, a open-source home 3D printer resembling a weird little loom that they consider a “self-replicating machine”, encouraging owners to first use it to print off another RepRap. Extend that into the future and you get what are called Von Neumann Machines: space probes that land on other planets and moons and use the available materials to print off and launch copies of themselves. A swarm of printers.)
+
+Meanwhile, at Harvard, a team of frightening people have engineered biocompatible robot flesh that can bond with human tissue and directly access the body’s electrical system. In success, the body would treat attached devices as organs to be operated by the central nervous system. An utter blurring of the line between the synthetic and the biological.
+
+Imagine, then, in 20 or 30 years' time, a very rich, very old man, in his dying breath, undocking his penis and releasing it to roam among the stars, where it prints off new copies of itself from lunar soil and asteroid ore, rubbing itself across the face of the very cosmos.
+
+The future’s kind of funny-looking, but it’s probably the future you deserve. Good morning, sinners.

test_docs/wev_your_god_not_strong.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
+All sides of a society can agree that speech should be free. Until, of course, it isn’t. George W Bush famously said, “There ought to be limits to freedom.” It’s the right to free speech until you say something that some people really don’t like. Often, something that the offended parties find it really hard to criminalise. It’s not quite as easy as it used to be to get libel, slander or malicious communication charges to stick to uncomfortable statements. Luckily for the uncomfortable, conservative countries have an ancient recourse. Something that was invented many thousands of years ago for the express purpose of keeping the uppity in line. Since summer, it’s been used in Russia as a political lever to shut people up, and in Greece too.
+
+Blasphemy. The act of insulting something regarded as holy. Thomas Aquinas characterised it as “a sin against God”. He was big on the idea that sinners needed to be killed, was our Thomas, with the ethical caveat/fig-leaf that it should be secular courts that saw people “exterminated” so that the Church could pretend to have clean hands. Because, apparently, a god is not such a big thing that it cannot be made to feel sad.
+
+Of course, the gods and prophets don’t even notice. The latter are dead and the former never showed any signs of life. Blasphemy, like heresy, is thoughtcrime: a questioning of institutions, authority structures and the way we live. When I wipe shit on the face of your god, I’m not doing it to your god – I’m doing it to you, because it’s you who serve it and you who use it as justification of your position. It’s a political act. It does, however, allow the state to pick up one of its most ancient weapons.
+
+“Hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” was the BBC’s translation of the sentence brought against three members of the Russian activist band Pussy Riot, a direct punishment by the state for entering a church and colourfully imploring that Vladimir Putin be removed from office. Many of the words were what some people call obscenities. Obscenities, like gods, are incorporeal things loaded with scary meaning for people who let that happen to them.
+
+In Greece, just a couple of weeks ago a young man was arrested for “malicious blasphemy” against a dead man. Elder Paisios was a monk. He died in 1994. There is apparently a movement to see him canonised, but right now he’s just bones and a beard. The young man operated a Facebook page that satirised Greek Orthodoxy, Elder Pastitsios – Pastitsio is a Greek pasta dish, and the name invoked Pastafarianism. It turns out the Greek police have a “cyber crimes” unit that was, presumably for want of anything better to do, peering at this page. And then Golden Dawn asked questions in Parliament about it, forcing them to act. Golden Dawn, you will recall, is the Greek Nazi party, openly being given power by the police to attack immigrants.
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+This is power consolidation. Committing blasphemy against a man who is neither a god, a prophet or even a saint is like committing blasphemy against my dog. My dog is not a god, a prophet or a saint, and, in fact, it also doesn’t exist because I don’t own a dog because I fucking hate dogs. But the Golden Dawn has just caused a man to be arrested for blasphemy in protection of the wounded feelings of Greek Orthodoxy in order to present itself as an ally to the Church.
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+It’s got nothing to do with God. It never did. If there were a god, and it felt mortal pain at the sin of blasphemy, it would be a vain and weak creature, unworthy of sympathy, let alone worship. But there isn’t. There are simply poisonous little men and women who build cages in the night for the people who remember how to think and laugh, and they stack those cages into great black iron walls of monolithic, truthless authority.