Introduction

The British Shorthair is a popular breed of domestic cat known for its round face, dense coat, and sturdy build. With their charming personalities and striking appearance, it's no wonder that many cat lovers are interested in adding a British Shorthair to their family. For those looking to purchase a British Shorthair, there are several factors to consider, including where to find one for sale, what to look for in a reputable breeder, and how to ensure the health and well-being of the new feline companion.

Understanding the British Shorthair Breed

The British Shorthair is a breed with a long and storied history, dating back to the early days of cat breeding in Britain. Known for their plush coat and distinctive round face, these cats are often described as having a teddy bear-like appearance. They are typically medium to large in size, with a muscular build and a calm, laid-back demeanor. British Shorthairs come in a variety of colors and patterns, including blue, black, cream, and tabby.
When looking for a British Shorthair for sale, it's important to be aware of the breed's characteristics and temperament. These cats are known for being affectionate and loyal companions, but they can also be independent and reserved at times. They are generally good with children and other pets, making them an excellent choice for families. However, they do require regular grooming to keep their coat in top condition.

Where to Find British Shorthairs for Sale

There are several options available for those looking to purchase a British Shorthair. One common avenue is through reputable breeders who specialize in the breed. It's essential to do thorough research when choosing a breeder to ensure that they adhere to ethical breeding practices and prioritize the health and well-being of their cats. Reputable breeders will provide documentation of the cat's pedigree, health records, and any necessary vaccinations.
Another option for finding a British Shorthair for sale is through rescue organizations or shelters. While purebred British Shorthairs may be less common in these settings, there are often mixed-breed cats with similar characteristics available for adoption. Adopting from a shelter not only gives a cat in need a loving home but also helps reduce the number of homeless pets in shelters.

What to Look for in a Reputable Breeder

When choosing a breeder to purchase a British Shorthair from, there are several key factors to consider. A reputable breeder will be transparent about their breeding practices and provide a clean and safe environment for their cats. They will also be knowledgeable about the breed and able to answer any questions you may have about caring for your new pet.
It's essential to visit the breeder in person before making a purchase to see the conditions in which the cats are raised. Look for signs of good health, such as bright eyes, clean ears, and a shiny coat. Ask to see the cat's parents if possible to get an idea of what the kitten may look like as it grows older. Additionally, make sure to ask about any health guarantees or warranties that the breeder offers.

Caring for Your British Shorthair

Once you've found the perfect British Shorthair for sale and brought them home, it's essential to provide them with proper care and attention. These cats thrive on routine and consistency, so be sure to establish a regular feeding schedule and provide plenty of opportunities for play and exercise. Regular grooming is also important to keep their coat healthy and free of mats.
In terms of healthcare, British Shorthairs are generally healthy cats but may be prone to certain genetic conditions, such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (a heart condition) or polycystic kidney disease. Regular veterinary check-ups are essential to catch any potential health issues early on. Additionally, make sure to provide your cat with a balanced diet and plenty of fresh water to keep them healthy and happy.

Conclusion

In conclusion, purchasing a British Shorthair can be a rewarding experience for cat lovers looking for a loyal and affectionate companion. By understanding the breed's characteristics, finding a reputable breeder or adoption organization, and providing proper care and attention, you can ensure that your new British Shorthair has a happy and healthy life with you. Whether you choose to adopt from a shelter or purchase from a breeder, welcoming a British Shorthair into your home is sure to bring joy and companionship for years to come.

British Shorthairs for Sale

British Shorthairs for Sale

British Shorthairs for Sale

British Shorthairs for Sale

British Shorthairs for Sale

Hi all - I am looking to apply to B School for 2025. I am sort of non-trad on the older side at 31 with around ~9 years of work experience in finance across US and UK. Started in Goldman IBD and moved to a few hedge funds (mix of well known and pedigreed start ups). I’m looking to transition to work for larger institutions on the private investing side and engage more with the companies invested in vs. super flat lean organizations that just trade public markets.
Harvard/Stanford Undergrad with 3.7 GPA. Haven’t taken the GRE but practice test are high and had a 2380 on the SAT way back when.
Goal is to go to Columbia/Wharton or Harvard. Maybe Booth but location isn’t ideal for me. I’m really not super fussed on which one as I think any provide a decent chance to pivot with my pre-MBA work experience. Understand I will probably take a large pay cut at the outset but money is not a motivator at all.
I understand it is important for the candidate and the specific MBA consultant to have a good fit (vs the firm) so I was wondering if folks had any ideas who specifically might be a good fit for my profile. I am terrible at crafting stories and admission essay writing in general so I think this sort of fit is crucial

How differentiated are the practices within Accenture Strategy - pedigree / type of work / exit opportunity/ lateral movement & project staffing wise ? (I know there is a pay difference)
Context : For a tenured Senior Consultant (2.5 yrs at level) with a Big 4’s Strategy practice (Business strategy officially, but a good amount of Tech Strategy overlap) , does it make sense to join TSA at a ManageL7 level ?
P.S. : It’s a GN role - currently part of a similar global talent pool as well.

https://phys.org/news/2024-04-dna-avar-cemetery-reveals-network.html

Hello,
I am an attending at a top derm program. I want to give you some practical advice about research years.

1. Research years can help your application. If you have a borderline application, having a productive research year with quality letters and papers does make you stand out. If you have red flags, a research year will not help (i.e. disciplinary issues, course failures, really low step score).
   
2. If you come from a low-tier med school, you will probably not match at a top-tier program (even if you have an amazing research year). This is a brutal reality, but it is true. When I read comments from med students, there seems to be anger directed at programs that don't match their fellows. The reality is that the top-tier programs get the best candidates. These candidates have impeccable pedigrees, life stories, boards scores, and LORs. Your research year is not going to surpass this. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are uncommon.
   
3. Make sure you get to know all the residents. The biggest cheerleaders for applicants are the residents. If the residents like you, when it comes time to rank candidates, they will let us know.
   
4. You get what you give. Research years can be highly productive or a waste of time. Be prepared to work hard and get projects across the finish line. If you mentor isn't giving you enough work, politely ask them if you can reach out to other faculty to get projects going.
   
5. Be careful about doing a research year with someone who takes more than one fellow. When I read residency applications, if a specific physician writes an LOR for more than one candidate, I can compare them. Invariably, one letter will be stronger than another, and if I must whittle down a stack of applications, the person with the weaker LOR gets the axe.
   
6. Take Step 2 before your research year. With the growing importance of Step 2, please take it after you finish your third year. It is an absolute waste to have an amazing research year and then bomb step 2 because you took it a year later that you should have.
   

​
A few other general pearls

1. The best training programs have a university, VA, and county hospital clinic
2. In the real world, where you did your residency matters a lot less than you think
3. Pediatric dermatologists are BRUTAL. If you think you are interested in peds derm, you must be 100% committed on your application and during your interview. If you want to go an extra-mile, apply to peds prelim years, and make sure derm programs know this. Peds derm faculty are often skeptical of applicants who want to go into their field; if you can convince them that you are legit, they will support you. However, if they suspect you are faking an interest in their field to boost your application, they will be the first to shoot you down. The single greatest mistake you can make in your application is faking an interest in peds derm; don't do it!
4. Too many applicants are interested in rheum-derm/CTCL/HS/onco-derm. If you want to standout, emphasize an interest in something different, such as vulvar, acne/rosacea, nails, patch testing, urticaria, psoriasis.

​
​

QB15. CARTER BRADLEY South Alabama 6031 213 lbs. 6SR Jacksonville, Fla. (Providence) 3/9/2000 (age 24.13) 

SUMMARY: A two-year starter at South Alabama, Bradley had things click after transferring to coach Major Applewhite’s version of the Air Raid. Despite spending only two seasons with the program, he made his mark by setting more than a dozen South Alabama records, including touchdown passes in a game (four), season (28) and career (47). A rhythm-based passer, Bradley keeps his eyes up and his feet active to scan and deliver with quality decision-making. However, he isn’t much of a creator when things fall apart, and mechanical inconsistencies and accuracy issues downfield will likely follow him to the next level. Overall, Bradley has NFL pedigree with the base traits needed for the pro game, but his tape is wildly inconsistent, as he looks like an NFL starter on some throws and a JV passer on others. He will get a chance once in camp.
GRADE: Priority Free Agent

WR35. TULU GRIFFIN Mississippi St. 5100 181 lbs. 4SR Philadelphia, Miss. (Philadelphia) 1/23/2001 (age 23.26) 

SUMMARY: A three-year starter at Mississippi State, Griffin was the H (slot) receiver in former offensive coordinator Kevin Barbay’s scheme with 90.6 percent of his 2023 snaps coming inside (although, he was primarily an outside receiver as an underclassman). He finished his college career with only one career 100-yard receiving performance, but he made it count (a school-record 256 yards vs. South Carolina in 2023), and he led the Bulldogs in receiving as a senior. Griffin, who received his “Tulu” nickname growing up because he was “too loose” in sports, is a speedy athlete and can get coverage leaning or create plays as a return man (his career 30.4 kick-return average is second best in SEC history). Mostly an underneath receiver (80 percent of his catches in 2023 came within 10 yards of the line of scrimmage), he has a smaller catch radius and is just as likely to have a frustrating drop as he is to make a difficult grab away from his body. Overall, Griffin lacks polish as a route runner, but he can be dangerous with the ball in his hands, and his return talent is a strong selling point. He projects as a bottom-of-the-roster receiver or a practice-squad candidate with return upside.
GRADE: 7th Round

WR50. RAMEL KEYTON Tennessee 6023 191 lbs. 5SR Marietta, Ga. (Marietta) 9/14/2000 (age 23.61) 

SUMMARY: Ramel Keyton grew up in Marietta and prepped at Marietta High. He finished his career with 184 catches for 3,353 yards and 33 touchdowns. A four-star recruit, he was a top-15 receiver in the class and committed to Tennessee over Alabama, Georgia and others. He produced career bests in 2023 (18.3 yards per catch ranked third in the SEC). Keyton is a long, lithe athlete who sells double moves well and does a nice job with hesitation on his vertical stems. He is a legitimate deepball threat but runs hot and cold tracking the ball and appears awkward at times making adjustments (especially in crowded catch points). Overall, Keyton is a “flash” receiver with the acceleration to be a weapon, but he lacks polish in the quick game and didn’t play a ton on special teams, which could limit his landing spots.
GRADE: Priority Free Agent

OT25. ANDREW COKER TCU 6067 315 lbs. 5SR Katy, Texas (James E. Taylor) 3/23/2001 (age 23.09) 

SUMMARY: A four-year starter at TCU, Coker was a mainstay at right tackle in offensive coordinator Kendal Briles’ zone-based scheme. He was predominantly a right tackle in high school and his first four seasons in Fort Worth before starting the first five games of 2023 at left tackle because of injuries (he returned to right tackle for the second half of the season). Coker is alert and active in pass protection, and his hand strikes are punctual and pierc ing, which helps him stay between the defender and the football. However, his feet are heavy, and his poor redirect and recovery makes it tough for him to sustain blocks, often leaving him overextended and compromised. Overall, Coker is an experienced, wide-bodied blocker with the base fundamentals and toughness to survive in the NFL, but his margin of error will be very small against NFL speed and power. He projects as a depth piece at both tackle and guard.
GRADE: 7th Round-Priority Free Agent

DE32. RON STONE JR. Washington State 6031 247 lbs. 6SR San Jose, Calif. (Valley Christian) 5/26/2000 (age 23.91) 

SUMMARY: Ron Stone Jr. grew up in a football family. His father (Ron) was a fourth-round pick (No. 96) in the 1993 NFL Draft and won two Super Bowls at guard with the Dallas Cowboys. His two older sisters (Ronna and Ronika) were college athletes at Oregon. Stonewas an All-League pass rusher as a senior at Valley Christian. A three-star recruit, he had multiple Pac-12 offers and signed with Washington State. He earned All-Pac-12 honors in each of his final three seasons. Stone is undersized and can get out of control in his attack, but multiple offensive linemen have said he was their toughest opponent, because of his violent hands and ability to work in different moves. He is relentless versus the run and tackles like he is in a bad mood. He projects as a SAM backer, although he is unproven in reverse. Overall, Stone is missing a distinguishing trait that will separate him on an NFL depth chart, but he has a worker-bee attitude and will make it tough for a coach to cut him.
GRADE: Priority Free Agent

CB43. JA’QUAN SHEPPARD Maryland 6016 199 lbs. 5SR Zephyrhills, Fla. (Zephyrhills) 4/12/2001 (age 23.04) 

SUMMARY: Ja’Quan Sheppard started playing football as an eighth grader in Zephyrhills. He moved to wide receiver in high school (30 catches as a senior), while also playing defensive back (four interceptions). A three-star recruit, he committed to Cincinnati over Kentucky and moved to defense. He had his breakout showing in 2022, leading the team in passes defended, and he entered the portal after Luke Fickell left Cincinnati for Wisconsin. Sheppard transferred to Maryland, where he earned All-Big Ten honors in 2023. He is a good-sized athlete who can jam and make receivers feel uncomfortable, early or late in the rep. He is quick-footed, although he does labor a bit when opening up, and his taller pad level can create a brief delay. He plays through hands well but also didn’t have an interception in college. Overall, Sheppard needs to better balance his aggression with added discipline, but his coverage mentality and back-end versatility should translate well.
GRADE: Priority Free Agent

https://phys.org/news/2024-04-dna-avar-cemetery-reveals-network.html

This in an interview in Damage Magazine with Andrew Scull on why we are in the crisis of homelessness and general anarchy with the severely mentally ill on the streets that we are. BTW it is interesting to se what kind of frankly disturbed people that actually lead the dinstitutionalization movement were and how they could in any way compare what was a well meaning and generally good system to the nazis shows how America in the 50s and 60s allowed fantasists too take over

Andrew Scull
What was Psychiatric Deinstitutionalization?
Andrew Scull
Apr 22, 2024 21 min
An interview with sociologist and historian of psychiatry Andrew Scull about the history and legacy of psychiatric deinstitutionalization.
The first school for the deaf founded in the United States. Opened in 1817 as the Connecticut Asylum (at Hartford) for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, the name later changed to the American School for the Deaf. Hiram P. Arms, Library of Congress, 1881.
Damage Magazine: What did care for the mentally ill look like before the rise of the asylums?
Andrew Scull: Well, that's going back a very long way. The asylum becomes the primary response to serious forms of mental illness beginning in the early nineteenth century, and as far as America's concerned, 1820’s, '30s, '40s. Before that, it depends a bit on where you are geographically. If you're talking about the United States, as far as we know, virtually everything revolved around the family. It was the family's responsibility to somehow cope, as best they could, with a deranged member. If there were no family members, then communities often intervened in an ad hoc fashion, often simply by locking them up in some informal fashion, as best they could, particularly if somebody were considered to be a dangerous person because of their mental distress.
That had been the case for many centuries in England. Beginning, even in the late seventeenth century, we see a handful of small, private madhouses operated for profit beginning to emerge, and a few charity asylums, the most famous of which dates all the way back into the twelfth century. That's Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam, as it was called. But we're talking about a very, very tiny fraction of people institutionalized in such places. At the end of the eighteenth century in England, there were maybe a couple thousand in such institutions, and a very wide range of experiences for those who were confined in them.
The asylum is essentially a nineteenth-century creation. It became apparent that mental illness bankrupts people, that it makes them unable to provide for themselves, and because its victims are incapable of work, mental illness tends to crash household resources. So whereas medical care remains a commodity you have to pay for, increasingly in the nineteenth century, on a state by state basis in the United States, state asylums begin to emerge, paid for by the public. The lunatics, as they're then called, are confined largely at public expense, sometimes with subventions from the family if they have some money.
There is a small private sector that emerges in the United States and some of those hospitals persist all the way down to today. The McLean Hospital, in the Boston area, being one example. Others of them have changed location, or names. There was one called the Hartford Retreat, set up in Connecticut at a time when Hartford was a very affluent part of the country. That, now, is called the Institute of Living—an attempt, I think, to disguise what it's about. Unfortunately, its address is “Asylum Avenue, Hartford, Connecticut,” so it doesn't quite work.
So, asylums begin in America. Once the notion has arisen that asylums might be able to cure mental illness, in a time of extreme optimism about what they can do, the main driving force spreading that notion and getting states to sign on to the expense of building these places is a woman named Dorothea Dix from Boston. At a time when women had no vote and were largely excluded from public life, this single, moral entrepreneur travels the length and breadth of the United States persuading good ol’ boy politicians that they need to spend money on this project.
Thanks to Dix and others, asylums grow rapidly in both number and size. So by the end of the nineteenth century, asylums of 1000, 5000, and even, in the case of Milledgeville, 10 or 12,000 patients, had arrived on the scene. From then forward until at least the middle of the twentieth century, the major official response to serious mental illness is to put people in institutions. Not everybody ends up there, of course, but we're talking by 1950, half a million people, on any given day, in state and county mental hospitals across the US.
DM: In accounting for the rise of the asylums you talk about moral entrepreneurs like Dix, and about the economic burden of caring for the mentally ill on individual families, but were there broader political economic shifts that gave rise to what you call the “empire of asylumdom”?
AS: Yes. I think there were. Geographical mobility, urbanization, the separation of work from the home, all of these things multiplied problems for families. They often broke extended families down. They made it much more difficult for families to use traditional expedience to cope with people at home.
This is also a time when states, including the United States, start to invest in institutional solutions to all sorts of social problems: poverty in the form of workhouses, prisons in the form of penitentiaries, and much more elaborate prison regimes, even institutions for other kinds of people who are seen as socially problematic, or have problems that are hard to cope with—institutions for the blind, institutions for juvenile delinquents. The nineteenth century sees the rise of that whole enterprise. Of course, it's dependent upon the expanding power of the state, its ability to tax, but also on an ideological shift that sees these kinds of institutions as a solution to the problems of crime, mental illness, or poverty.
Dorothea L. Dix, Superintendent of Army Nurses for the Union Army, holds a book and sits in a room with a medical bag on the floor, 1865. Liljenquist Family collection, Library of Congress.
DM: What was the “moral treatment”? Where did it come from? And how did it influence asylum practices?
AS: In the late eighteenth century, in France, in England, in Italy to some degree, you have the rise of institutions trying to cope with people rather than keep them scattered among families. In those institutions, there's very little in the way of external control, at that time. There's a wide variety of things tried out. Almost by trial and error, some of the people managing mental patients develop a technique, which is known in France as traitement moral and in England as moral treatment.
Fundamental to this moral treatment approach, to its early successes, and to the optimism that it generates is the idea that human nature is malleable; that it's a product of environmental influences, that people can be coaxed back to sanity, or to the common sense that the rest of us think we share. That's done partly through the physical environment. This is why asylums are so central, early on, because in those institutions you can control things much more, but you also create a moral architecture. Moral treatment wants to do away with straightforward imprisonment as much as possible, to substitute for it incentives for people to behave themselves, coax them into reasserting their own powers of self-control over their behavior. Reward them when they do that, and penalize them, but not through harsh punishments, when they don't.
So all aspects of the environment are terribly important. You locate asylums in pleasant surroundings. You disguise the fact there are bars on the windows by painting them to look as though they're the usual wood dividers of windows. You allow people who behave themselves to take tea with you in the English ritual, at four o’clock in the afternoon. You encourage them to take pets because that brings them out of themselves.
To be clear, the point was not to reason with people about their madness. Moral treatment proponents are very clear that you can't do that. This is not Freudianism. This is not getting people to talk about their mind, it's getting them to suppress it. When I say “suppress,” that highlights the other side of moral treatment, which is that it becomes a series of techniques for controlling people's behavior and evolves eventually into a ward system, which the Canadian American sociologist, Erving Goffman, analyzes in the mid-twentieth century.
So if you act out, if you behave badly, you move down the hierarchy to an ever more impoverished environment until you are with people who are demented and otherwise incapable of normal communication. The basic message is, “If you behave yourself, we'll start to improve your surroundings. If you want to see the outside world at all, you better control yourself.” Eventually it becomes this organized routine, this set of rules, that really is no longer the kind of individualized moral therapy that it started out being in the early nineteenth century. Over time, patients lose their autonomy, they lose their ability to make choices in their lives. From the point of view of those running the institutions, that makes it easier for them to cope. But from the patient's point of view, it kind of exacerbates whatever pathology already exists.
DM: You have written in Madness in Civilization: "Few would dispute the claim that asylums operated along moral treatment lines provided a more humane environment than the worst of the traditional madhouses. Well, actually the French philosopher Michel Foucault and his followers would." What was Foucault's characterization, and why is it wrong?
AS: I have a lot of quarrels with Foucault as a historian, which he really wasn't. He was a philosopher and social thinker. I would say I see a more complicated, more nuanced picture than Foucault does. There was a Roman god named Janus, who had a face facing forward and a face facing backward, two-sided. Foucault, for me, is too one-sided. He sees the defects, but fails to acknowledge anything on the other side of the equation. It's all oppressive. It's all hopeless. I'm, by no means, a naive optimist about the situation. I don’t subscribe to the meliorist notion that these asylums were wonderful places. They clearly were not, in many, many ways, particularly as time passed. The thing they did provide was a roof over people's heads, food (which was often pretty awful, but nonetheless was food), clothing, and some attempts at social stimulation, for at least a fraction of the patients.
But it’s certainly true that asylums did become awful places over time. When patients were locked away like this, out of sight and out of mind, there was a lot of hidden violence. You were asking ill-educated, ill-trained attendants, who were the people most of the patients saw most of the time, to turn the other cheek when patients exhibited no gratitude, when they were violent, when they would throw feces at you. So, the subculture of a certain degree of violence was certainly there, no matter how hard anybody tried to eliminate it.
Patients also came increasingly to be blamed for their own status. They were seen as lacking some of the central qualities of humanness, if you like. When you look at the writings of alienists, or psychiatrists, as they came to call themselves at the end of the nineteenth century, they start talking about these people as defective, as people who have the sort of pedigree of mongrel dogs, as if they'd be wrapped up in a sack and thrown into a pond and drowned. So there's this very harsh language that then mutates into an untrammeled willingness to experiment on patients, in ways that in retrospect look quite horrific. It's the isolation of these institutions, and the stigma attached to mental illness, and the powerlessness of the patients, that permits this kind of thing to happen over and over again.
By the last third of the nineteenth century, mental hospitals had lost their luster. They had lost much of their claim to be therapeutic institutions. In part, it was an over-exaggeration, but they're seen as places where once you enter, the only way you're going to come out is in a pine box. Now, that's not actually true. Even in the depths of late nineteenth-century pessimism, perhaps a third or a little more of each year's intake would leave within a year. The thing is, if you didn't leave within a year to eighteen months, you were unlikely to leave, except when you were dead.
So, the institution's reputation becomes one of a kind of warehouse, if you like. Then in the early twentieth century, faced with that reputation, we see the emergence of attempts to break with that pessimism. These often move social policy in directions that, looking back, seem rather pernicious. So we have, for example, the connections of mental illness to eugenics, to the fact that it appears to be to some degree a hereditary disorder, as it still is thought to be. This is when we see the rise of involuntary sterilization and other interventions increasingly directed at the body. Attempts to shock people back into sanity, attempts to operate on their brains, to operate on other body parts, assuming that infections elsewhere in the body are poisoning the brain. In a pre-antibiotic era, you've got to rip out the bits that are infected, whether it be teeth, tonsils, stomachs, or colons. So, there are a lot of interventions of that sort: insulin coma therapy, ECT, lobotomy, and a lot more besides.
The mentally ill become shut up in a double sense. They're obviously locked away, but they also lose all their civil rights, and their voices are not listened to. They're seen as the product of their mental illness, and therefore, to be disregarded.
DM: Aside from the bad reputation that the asylums had gained, and the obvious inhumanity of the new methods adopted in the twentieth century, what else drove deinstitutionalization?
AS: The nineteenth century solution to the problems of criminality, poverty, and mental illness was to build big institutions, and that persisted well into the middle of the twentieth century. In New York state in 1950, if you looked at the state budget, 30% of it went to New York state's mental hospitals. They were a huge expense. There were conferences of governors in the late '40s and '50s, where they all asked, “What are we going to do? This is a huge problem.”
It was becoming more expensive, and thus a more pressing problem, for a couple of reasons. First of all, many of these institutions had been built 50, 100 years before and were decaying, particularly because they hadn't been invested in during both the Great Depression and World War II. Also, after World War II, union strength was growing. The attendants in the mental hospitals were unionizing. Work weeks had been 80 or 90 hours a week, and you lived on the premises. If you were an employee, you were trapped every bit as much as the patients. But now work weeks became 50 or 55 hours. That added to the expense of things.
There were also a lot of journalistic exposés of the mental hospital, later supplemented by the work of sociologists and anthropologists. Right after the war, a number of American journalists had been to the death camps in Germany and in what's now Poland. These returning journalists came back and visited America's mental hospitals and said, “These are America's death camps.” Due to the wartime shortages of food, attendants, and physicians, the hospitals were probably at the nadir of their status in those years. So Albert Deutsch, for example, was a journalist who'd written the first positive history of mental illness in America. He went around and produced a series of newspaper articles that were published in a book called The Shame of the States, where he explicitly compared what he'd seen to Belsen and Buchenwald. He wasn't alone in making that comparison.
So the reputation of the mental hospital was plummeting. It was in a very bad way. And yet, by 1955, on any given day, there were 500,000+ patients in these hospitals. Today, it’s less than 40,000, and our overall population has doubled. If we still institutionalized at the rate we did in the mid-'50s, there'd be over a million people in mental hospitals. Obviously, there aren't. A lot of them, however, are back in the jails. Dorothea Dix's campaign, in part, was to rescue mental patients who were confined in colonial and early national jails, and put them in reformed asylums. Now, the three largest institutions coping with the mentally ill in America are LA County Jail, Cook County Jail in Chicago, and Rikers Island in New York—all of them hellholes, without exception.
Of course, another side effect of the relatively abrupt discontinuation of the asylum system, and its non-replacement by anything substantial, is the homeless problem that confronts cities all across the United States, and particularly along the west coast.
Rikers Island, 2006. Wikimedia.
DM: I want to provide a summary judgment of the asylum as an institution, and maybe you can say why it's wrong, or how it needs to be complicated. In brief, it’s an institution that started off with good intentions, under the belief that through the moral treatment people could be brought back to some kind of common sense. But over time, through an increasing emphasis on biological factors, they became more inhumane towards asylees' individual subjectivity, and at the same time institutions that, because of a lack of funding and being overstretched for the populations they were trying to deal with, just sort of fell into ruin. Is that a fair summary judgment of the asylums?
AS: I think it's not far off the mark. The early moral treatment institutions, when they began, had 50, 100, 120 patients. On Long Island, in the 1930s and '40s, you had institutions of 10, 15, 20,000, and any chance of individual attention to a patient simply vanished in the face of that kind of growth. It really, in part, was a function of simple mathematics. The early people thought they could cure 60, 70, 80% of patients in the asylums. In fact, maybe 40% would leave within the year, and then the rest would accumulate. Of course, some died. But over time, that inevitably created a situation where a larger and larger fraction of the whole were the chronic patients, and the new incomers, as a fraction of the whole, were less and less. That fed into the sense that these were places that didn't work and didn't cure. Once that perception spread, getting states to allocate substantial sums of money to keep these places running, at a reasonable level, became almost impossible.
The old phrase, "Out of sight, out of mind," really did apply. Patients were isolated. Except for the occasional journalists penetrating the scene, patients were largely invisible, and families lost hope. Connections to families, over time, attenuated and disappeared. So it really was a very difficult situation. That said, it's still important to recognize that even in fairly horrible conditions, patients had a roof over their head. They had some kind of food and some kind of clothing, and occasionally some social activities. It's, on the whole, a negative picture, but something where you have to bear in mind what the alternatives might've been and have proved to be, I think, since we've abandoned this system.
DM: There were two books that appeared in 1961. You've mentioned one already, Erving Goffman's Asylums, and then Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness. Together they comprise something like a foundational critique of, not just the asylum as an institution, but the entire paradigm that informs the asylum as an institution. What do you make of these two works today? Were they accurate in their critiques? Were they overblown?
AS: Well, they were part of a broader movement in the '60s to criticize the psychiatric enterprise. They're rather different, I think. But overall, both of them contributed to delegitimizing the asylum system and did so by pointing out, often quite powerfully, its drawbacks and its defects, without really talking about what the alternatives were likely to be, if indeed they existed. Goffman tended to imply that the institution was the problem itself, that it tended to create the very behaviors that legitimized its existence in a kind of paradoxical fashion. It undermined patient autonomy. It created behaviors that to outsiders looked bizarre. But he had very little sense, other than talking about a certain “betrayal funnel,” about why it was that people ended up in these places. I think that was a huge failing in the book.
Szasz was... how to put it? He was an extreme libertarian in his politics. The Left often, in the '60s, adopted him, but they didn't realize what they were adopting. Szasz was a violent opponent of any state support for anything and considered that the mental hospitals were equivalent to concentration camps or prisons. He thought the people running them, his fellow psychiatrists, were acting in the interest of the state, not the patient. This condition called mental illness was, in his view, a myth because there was no physical cause of the condition. It wasn't an illness like pneumonia or tuberculosis. It was a socially constructed thing, a way of coping with people whose behavior we didn't like, and we couldn't abide. Under the guise of helping them, Szasz claimed, people were railroaded into these institutions that were nothing better than holding pens, prisons.
In the late 1960s, the purview of public interest law, which had emerged mainly around the Civil Rights Movement, began to expand. Some of those lawyers began to move from civil rights to talking about gay rights, to talking about the rights of mental patients, to talking about feminism and the rights of women. So they often seized upon these critiques of the mental hospital, and the critiques of the whole concept of mental illness, to launch a legal attack on these institutions.
There was a very famous case in Alabama, where George Wallace was the governor. It's called Wyatt v. Stickney. Stickney was the mental health commissioner for the state of Alabama. He actually invited the lawsuit because he wasn't getting any money out of Wallace to run his mental hospitals. He thought this lawsuit might help. So the lawsuit was launched, and it was heard by Judge Frank Johnson. He was a federal judge who'd been in law school with Wallace and loathed Wallace. He had testimony about what the minimum American psychiatric standards for a mental hospital would be, how many doctors per 100 patients, how many nurses, how many attendants, what the budget should be like, etc.
He decided the case and said to Wallace, “You have to provide these conditions.” Wallace's response was to discharge about 4,500 of the 5,000 patients in Alabama’s hospitals. Then for the 500 remaining, why, then he met the rules. So it was kind of perverse, but I think the lawyers bringing that suit, in part, actually wanted to get the patients out. What happened in the 1960s was this odd convergence of the Left and the Right in the critique of institutional psychiatry.
On the Left, they'd been convinced by the stories of the abuses in mental hospitals, of the travails of the patients, the loss of civil rights that confronted somebody who was declared insane. On the Right, for people like Szasz, these were examples of the state spending money it shouldn't have. I shared a lecture platform with him a couple of times. Once up in Canada, for example, two topics came up that kind of shocked the left-wing audience that assembled to hear him. This was a time when there were a series of murders in New York by somebody called the Son of Sam, who had gone around shooting courting couples in their cars and killing them. He'd finally been caught and pleaded insanity. The audience asked Szasz what he would do. He said, “Well, if he were my patient, I'd turn him into the police. Once he was convicted, I'd be happy to throw the switch and electrocute him.” There were gasps from the audience, but that was Szasz's position.
Then, the second thing that came up was about the safety net, social welfare, and social security, and Szasz said, “That should be abolished. People should provide for themselves, and if they can't, that's their tough luck.” So you had civil libertarians attacking the institution because of its failings. You had Szasz and people like Ronald Reagan, who became governor of California at the crucial moment, also wanting to abolish these places for a rather different reason. They didn't like the state intervention, but they also didn't like the amounts of money it was costing.
DM: How did deinstitutionalization proceed through different phases?
AS: Mental hospital populations peaked in 1955 in America. They begin to decline, somewhat slowly, for the first decade. Then from the late 1960s onwards, the pace of discharge picks up very sharply. Eventually, mental hospitals are largely emptied, and it becomes very hard to get into them. The psychiatrists often embrace the idea that this was all because of the advent of modern drug therapy, anti-psychotics, antidepressants. There's a lot of evidence that shows that's not the case, from a whole variety of perspectives. Some states adopted the drugs early, some adopted them later. Some state’s systems, like California’s, had hospitals that used drugs extensively, and others that didn't. When you look for patterns, you don't see what you'd expect to see. The hospitals that weren't using drugs were discharging patients more rapidly than the ones that were.
Yet when you look at the pattern of discharge, what you do see in the late 1960s is a massive discharge of old patients, patients over the age of 65. Then what you see from about 1972 forward is that that discharge pattern extends to younger patients. So what's going on at that point?
The first point, the '60s discharges among the elderly, that's Johnson's Great Society program. It's the passage of Medicare and Medicaid. Those old patients, if they're in the state hospitals or on the state budget, if they're discharged and go to nursing homes and board and care homes, they're on Uncle Sam's budget. So there's an incentive to move the patients out. You can see, as the elderly population in the mental hospitals goes down, the elderly population in the nursing homes goes up. It's a parallel development. What happens in 1972, under Richard Nixon of all people? Supplemental Security Income, in addition to social security, which provides a stipend to people who are disabled, including those who are mentally disabled.
You get the emergence of what I call a new trade in lunacy, another one of these things where entrepreneurs batten onto a new source of income. Problems emerge here because they're only lightly regulated, if they're regulated at all, these alternatives to the mental hospital. And the amount of profit you make is inversely proportional to how much you spend on the patient. So the patient brings in a check for $300. If you spend $290 of that on the patient, they probably get better living conditions, but you only make a tiny amount of money. If you spend $180 on them, well, you make a lot more money. So the logic of the marketplace dictated that these places did not provide great care. Then when we get into the 1990s, there’s welfare reform, which is one of Bill Clinton's great initiatives, and before that we have Reagan and Bush. So the safety net, which was never terribly strong, gets weakened and weakened and weakened. Now the states aren't providing, and the feds aren't providing, and you have a festering problem.
A homeless encampment in downtown Los Angeles, near City Hall, 2021. Russ Allison Loar, Wikimedia.
DM: What is needed for the care of the mentally ill today? Is it too much to say that we need to re-institutionalize in some way?
AS: Well, that's an enormously complicated question. What's happened over the last 50, 75 years is much more complicated than I've been able to talk about here. One of the great changes, of course, has been the psychopharmacological revolution, the arrival of drugs. Those have become American psychiatry's almost sole and singular remedy for serious mental illness. If you look at patterns, very few MD psychiatrists offer psychological counseling of any sort anymore. Yet when we look at mental illness, we see a problem that may well have not only biological roots, but also environmental, social, and psychological roots, and certainly environmental, social, and psychological impacts that have to be addressed.
So to the extent we narrow our focus to simply medication, and medication which is a band-aid rather than a cure anyway, we’re only addressing the symptoms of some fraction of patients. Half of all patients with depression aren't helped by antidepressants, and a large fraction of people with psychosis aren't helped, or only helped a bit, by these drugs, which have powerful side effects as well. So we've got to move away from biology as the sole solution to the problem.
We are also going to have to provide, but I don't think the political will is there to do it, some sheltered housing. This is going to be very controversial, but we also have to ask: to what degree are we going to involve compulsion in the system, and to what degree are the courts going to even allow that to happen? Both commitment statutes and court rulings about what you're allowed to do to somebody against their will have made it a very fraught legal situation to actually introduce an element of compulsion. It depends on whether you buy Szasz's view that this is all a myth, or you accept that there's a reality to psychotic illnesses, whether you accept the proposition that some people lose the ability to make appropriate choices about their lives. If you take the position that the state should not be able to compel somebody to get treatment, then I think you're facing a massive problem. But if you allow that compulsion, first of all, are you going to get it past the courts? Assuming you do, how are you going to guard against the kinds of abuses that existed back in the past? We would need to invest very substantial resources in this problem.
The difficulty is that this is a very unappealing population. Mental illness carries with it stigma. It always has. In every society I know, people recoil from it. Many people with serious mental illness are not going to get better. It's one thing to invest money where you're going to see a return, if you like, in the form of somebody being rescued. I don't want to imply that people never recover. Of course, that's not true. But with patients who were chronic in the asylum, patients who at best are going to improve a bit but are still going to be probably incapable of providing for much of their daily living, they're a burden. How do you persuade a public that has been sold on the idea that we're all individually responsible for ourselves that there is a collective obligation to provide a minimum level for all citizens? It's a hard sell. When you see budgets being cut over the last 70 years, programs for the mentally ill are always among the easiest to cut, and the hardest to increase.
Then the further problem is, "Do we have effective treatments?" The answer is, "Well, for some fraction of patients, yes. We have things that will make their lives significantly better." So, it's not a completely hopeless situation. But for many mental patients, what's going to happen to them with the best tools we have at hand? Drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy, whatever interventions we're talking about here. We can control their symptoms a bit. We can get them back, to some degree, in control over their lives. But being able to abolish their problems completely, we don't have that magic bullet. We simply don't possess it. I wish we did, but the honest answer to that situation is that we have, at the best, palliative measures.
Right now mayors across the United States, in New York, in Portland, in Seattle, in LA, in San Francisco, they’re all realizing they've got a huge problem on their hands. The public, which is increasingly seeing how having our streets full of people, some of whom are seriously mentally ill, is damaging the very social fabric of daily life. So there's some pressure on the other side. Whether that will result in punitive responses, or more caring and effective responses, remains to be seen.
■
Andrew Scull is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California-San Diego and author of ~Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine~.

Darvin Ham is - A motivational speaker, who if the team is willing can rally the troops and keep spirits up. - Has a good offensive system and principles, can get a team to execute it well. - I’d say has okay understanding of defensive strategies but does not know how to make a team execute it well. - Has a fine initial game plan, emphasis on initial
Darvin Ham IS NOT - Someone who can make timely in-game adjustments, like it all. He gets punched, doesn’t know how to counter - Able to or just doesn’t know how to implement, practice, or perfect his defensive system. It’s one thing to understand how a system should be run. It’s another thing to get a team to buy-in, practice, and perfect it with a team of 10-15 players. - Someone who can figure out an optimal rotation, especially when injuries occur. Can’t just be by feel or what he sees in practice. You gotta lean into advanced stats. - Someone who knows how to manage an actual game (TO, challenges, rotations, SOB, ATO, etc). He is below average in all that.
In the end Ham is just a rookie coach who doesn’t have advanced levels to his coaching pedigree. Maybe some of that is on the coaching staff. You gotta delegate agency over aspects of the game.
It’s honestly probably hard as hell to find a coach who can do ALL that. And you do need all that in your coach or maybe just most of it depending on the level of maturity of the team.
Lakers FO should have known that you can’t combine a Lebron who is in the twilight of his career with a Low IQ coach when it comes to defensive schemes and in-game adjustments. Lebron is too smart for that shit and now you’ve created some disassociation.
Give credit where credit is due, Ham has implemented great offensive principles that have unlocked some key rotation players.
But as Lebron said in his pod, you gotta have bball IQ in the playoffs. There’s too many counters and counter to other counters happening to a point where offensive systems go out the door and what you need most is just a quality look at a bucket. And Lebron isnt always going to get it right, so you need to surround him with other high IQ players and coaches to throw ideas at each other.
Not saying he could never achieve that level of thinking during a game. Just saying at this point in his coaching career, he doesn’t have yet it.

Lets establish some facts first:

• Deco had denied the possibility of hiring Marquez multiple times earlier this year
• As of right now, Flick and Tuchel are free at the end of this season. Nagelsmann's future too was up in the air till yesterday.
• No significant negotiations have been made with anyone apart from possibly Flick. Flick is now in negotiation with Bayern too.

With all the recent reports from credible sources, it doesn't take a genius to realise that unless Xavi changes his decision, we are pretty certainly getting Marquez next season. Crazy decision, right? No way Laporta is that careless? You're right, he isn't. Why is he ignoring Tuchel and Flick to hire a guy with no first division experience? Here are the reasons:

• First and foremost, there is practically no money. Why does it matter?
• Tuchel and Flick will definitely demand high quality signings and Marquez will work with whatever he has
• Tuchel and Flick have some pedigree in the sport by now and they won't be afraid to speak up against the board if needed
• Marquez will hardly complain, he will also get most of the blame from the media. He's just happy to get this enormous opportunity

Why doesn't Laporta just admit the truth and stop deluding the fans? He promised to restore the club to sustainable finances and sporting dominance, and after 3 years its not looking good for him. Currently our most promising players (Yamal, Cubarsi, Pedri, Gavi, Balde) all joined the club under Bartomeu. Laporta's 40mil "prospect" signing, Roque has been a bust so far. The 60mil fee, 36mil/yr marquee signing has less goals than Morata and Borja Mayoral. This is where his "inheritance" excuse falls apart. His ego is too big for him to admit his boastful ambitions were mostly empty words.

This is a follow up to the great post a couple days ago from u/ZathrasNotTheOne.
TL;DR: A combination of Professional Networking, Experience, Capabilities, Certifications, and Higher Education is your path to a good salary, any one of these alone will do very little for you.
Okay, so a little bit of background. I've been in communications, primarily networking, for around 9 years now. I have my certifications, a college degree, and a security clearance. I've been messaging a number of people on this sub who have reached out for advice and I'd just like to share publicly what I've learned about how to enter the field and working your way towards that salary we're all looking for of 100k, 120k, 150k+. Hopefully this post can help some people out.
In my opinion, there are 5 things you can have that will help you be successful, and any one of these things alone isn't likely to result in any success. I've listed them in order of importance.
Professional Network (Who You Know): The best way to get hired by a company is to be referred by an existing employee. When a position becomes open in a company, they don't list it publicly on job sites immediately. They try to internally promote or move someone into the position. If that doesn't work, employee referrals are the next (kind of unofficial) step, and if that doesn't work, then it goes to the public. The reason you never get interviews even though you've applied to 100 positions on indeed is because you're filtered by an AI tool, and then by an HR person on paper, then the HR person via phone, etc. until a fraction of a percent of applicants even get a technical interview. Instead, it's better to network with people around you. Your friends, IT department at your current company/school, your Aunt, that guy from the gym, etc. Someone you know is in IT/Cybersecurity. Talk with those people, express your interest in their field, ask them if their work is hiring. If you get referred in, you'll skip all the applications, AI tools, HR, etc. and usually go straight to the personality and technical interviews with the hiring manager. You'll probably be offered a position before you ever even submit the actual application on the company portal, which by then is just a rubber stamp. A recruiter will look at a resume with 5 years of experience for a position that requires 7 and might throw it away. A hiring manager or a team lead will see that 5 years and not care at all as long as you interview well and have the capabilities they need. If you want to actually get looked at for jobs consistently, build a professional network, it's an absolute necessity.
Experience and Capabilities (What You Know): Companies are hiring you to DO THINGS. They aren't hiring you to have certifications or a degree. What can YOU DO? What are your actual skills and capabilities? Being able to pass Security+ isn't a skill beyond just being studious. Are you experienced in and good with organizational leadership, networking tools, Linux devices, device repair, cloud administration, penetration testing, cable installation, etc.? I recommend that you get a job, any job, in the field when you're starting out. Nothing is below you because you're starting from zero, work at a helpdesk, a cable installation company, your cable provider, anywhere that you can get experience and learn things. Cybersecurity is not an entry-level position; You need some other type of experience first before you move into cyber. After all, why would an employer trust you to protect an infrastructure you don't understand? Would you trust a cop who doesn't know how a road works? Get any job you can when you're starting, you'll learn new skills, get experience on your resume, and build your professional network!
Security Clearances, If Applicable: This portion is a bit U.S. centric, disregard if it doesn't apply to you. I highly recommend pursuing any position that can grant you a security clearance. Typically this is found through military/civil service or a company contracted to support the government in some way. Having a security clearance increases your earning potential substantially and narrows the field of other competitive candidates. Personally, I recommend military service if you're qualified and inclined to do so since you'll receive tons of free training and benefits, but to each their own.
Certifications: Notice, this is item #4. They're important, no doubt, but not in they way that you think. Having a certification doesn't do anything more for an employer than help them meet regulatory/contractual requirements and perhaps give them a baseline for your level of skill/understanding. That's it. For example, many companies follow DoD 8570/8140 and will require that all administrators have a minimum of Security+ due to that regulation, but they aren't hiring you just because you have Security+, or even the trifecta + CASP+. Your network, skills, and experience are what will get you to the finish line, certifications are just the cost of admission to the race.
Higher Education: This is the bottom of the list, the least important element of your success by far. IT isn't an industry where a degree is required like practicing law or medicine. It's insane to me how many people are on here going into debt at a 4 year university on a cybersecurity program just hoping there will be an unpaid internship at the end for them. That's INSANE. You're going in the exact opposite order that you should be. Instead of going into debt, get a job and make money instead while simultaneously earning more friends, experience, skills, and certifications (which are usually company sponsored). While you're doing all that, sure go to school online at somewhere like WGU (by the way the pedigree of your alma mater basically doesn't matter as long as it isn't AMU, Liberty, DeVry, or UoP), but don't do that full time when you don't have any skills or experience. There will be a time when you need to check a box that says "B.S. in Computer Science or Related Field", but that time isn't now. It's 5-10 years from now, so go out there and get the skills/experience you need.
Your certifications are important, and you should be proud that you were able to pass! But please, focus on everything else too if you want the success you're looking for.
Alright, that's it. I will step off of my soapbox now. But seriously, I'm here to help out anyone and everyone I can. If anyone has any questions or anything, please ask!

Good heavens above, where does one even begin to unpack the sheer, unadulterated travesty that has been foisted upon my noble personage? It is a tale of Shakespearean proportions, a veritable Odyssey of academic hubris and dreams dashed against the jagged, diamond-encrusted rocks of cold, unfeeling bureaucracy. I, the scion of the Trump dynasty - a name synonymous with unparalleled success, unimpeachable integrity, and absolutely zero questionable business practices whatsoever - find myself ensnared in a veritable Gordian knot of my own making. A prisoner of my own unbridled ambition, like Icarus plummeting from the sky after daring to fly too close to the sun while wearing a pair of solid gold aviator sunglasses.
You see, it all started when the naysayers and philistines of the world - a motley crew of so-called "college counselors" who clearly had no appreciation for my family's storied legacy and unparalleled influence - tried to insist that my 2.7 GPA, painstakingly curated to mirror a certain patriarch's own stellar academic record, would never in a million years earn me a spot at the illustrious Harvard University.
Pah! As if I would ever deign to sully my academic pedigree with a mere degree from that institution. Alack! It rhymes with "farton," which I seldom heed to take note of. Why, the very thought of it is enough to make my ego recoil in horror, like a vampire confronted with a crucifix made of pure, 24-karat... "farton". But alas, in a moment of weakness, I allowed their taunts and jeers to cloud my judgment, and before I knew it, I had signed that accursed binding contract, pledging my fealty to the woefully inadequate, nay, downright plebeian halls of that school.
And yet, in a stroke of pure, unadulterated luck - nay, divine intervention, orchestrated by the very hand of God Himself, or perhaps an especially benevolent team of lawyers armed with the finest legal strategies money can buy! - I somehow managed to parlay my family's, shall we say, "generous" financial contributions into a coveted spot at the hallowed Harvard University.
And yet, in the throes of my Harvard-induced euphoria, I had somehow managed to completely erase from my memory the binding contract I had signed mere months prior, pledging my academic fealty to the woefully inadequate, nay, downright plebeian halls of that... "farton" - a transgression akin to forgetting that I had promised to donate my entire collection of solid gold cutlery to the local soup kitchen, only to be reminded by a strongly worded letter from a certain philanthropic foundation.
It is a transgression that now weighs upon my conscience like the very millstone that dragged poor Sisyphus down into the depths of Hades, condemned to have my metaphorical boulder of academic integrity eternally rolling back down the hill of despair, like a rabid, themed bowling ball careening out of control, knocking over display cases full of questionable business ventures. How could I, the scion of such a prominent dynasty - a name synonymous with flawless decision-making, tremendous success, and absolutely no shady business dealings whatsoever - have been so foolish, so brazen, as to betray the sacred trust of that school's admissions committee? Surely, they shall descend upon me with the wrath of a thousand Valkyries, their steely gazes piercing my very soul as they demand satisfaction for my egregious slight, like a horde of angry bald eagles swooping down to reclaim their stolen nest of golden eggs.
And now, as I sit here, I can practically hear the disdainful sneers of the Harvard deans: "You, a mere acolyte of that other institution?" they shall surely scoff, "How dare you sully the hallowed grounds of this place with your tainted academic pedigree!" Oh, the ignominy of it all, like a knife to the heart of my very being, a pain as sharp and precise as a solid gold letter opener, emblazoned with a certain family motto about winning at all costs.
So tell me, my esteemed colleagues:
How the ever-loving duck do I break this binding Wharton commitment?

Initial disclaimer: I have a dog so I speak for all dog owners and that is final.
Dog park was dry and perfect condition today. No mean dogs. But there were 10 dogs off leash on the lawn at the same time.
I’m not gonna take weird pictures of yall. But I think it’s wrong to use the passive lawn as a second dog park. We’ve got a pretty nice dog park that Parks and the community put a lot into keeping up. It’s a resource most areas don’t have.
You might think it’s innocent but that field is gonna be torn up after a couple months of dogs sprinting on it, just in time for the picnics/lounging that the field was meant for.
I’m also white and speak for all white people (also final). All the dog folks on the lawn today were white. There was a crowd of 5 folks of color (who likely have been in bed stuy more than 4 years) pretty upset on the side of the lawn. A ton of us will complain about littering and noise, but then turn around and break the rules for our pedigreed doodle-combo or whatnot. Get a grip and practice what you preach!
EDIT: one thing I forgot to mention. Totally get the joy of seeing your dog sprint around a big field of grass. Ft Greene is just over a mile away and has off leash hours before 9. It’s awesome. Prospect is the same and even better, just more of a hike.

Overview
We all know the Red Sox haven’t developed a single viable starting pitcher (i.e., one who gave the team 100 starts) since Clay Bucholz. In fact, between 2007 and 2022 the most starts for Boston by a pitcher signed and developed by the organization was…69, by Felix Doubront (2010, 2012-2014). In that fifteen-year period the Red Sox not only failed to provide themselves with a homegrown starter but even the ones they traded away generally failed to make a major league impact (Justin Masterson is the sole exception with 184 career starts, or about two and a half Doubronts). The following is a full list of every pitcher ranked as one of the Red Sox ten best prospects since the debut of Clay Bucholz (as measured by soxprospects.com), what happened to them, and if possible, why they did not make an impact at the major league level.
Note: For the sake of my sanity and yours I did not include any pitcher who failed to make multiple appearances on one of the three rankings done by soxprospects.com in consecutive seasons. In practice this means I will not acknowledge the guy who was ranked eighth in June 2017 because he had a good month at Single A. Hardcore Travis Lankins fans and Trey Ball-truthers may feel free to politely vent their frustration. I am also not including guys still in the organization.
Justin Masterson (2006-2008)
Masterson is both the last and first of his kind, a genuine starting pitcher prospect who succeeded in the bigs as well as a disappointment for the Sox. A mid-season callup in 2008, Masterson worked as both a fill-in starter that year as well as an excellent middle reliever, posting a 3.16 ERA in 36 games (nine of which were starts)/ nearly 90 innings; Sox Prospects predicted his ceiling as “a #3 starter or a dominant set-up man,” depending on how his ability to control his sinker developed. Through the first half of 2009, this dual role for Masterson continued until he was traded to Cleveland as part of the package for Victor Martinez. The Indians committed to Masterson as a starter and by 2011 he was their de facto ace (this was right before they came up with Kluber and Carrasco and the rest of those mid to late 2010s staffs); between that season and the next two Masterson became an archetypal mid-rotation workhorse, pitching 615 innings with a 3.86 ERA (100 ERA+). However, in his walk year he suffered a series of injuries to his knee, back, and shoulder, was traded to the Cardinals at the deadline, and struggled with control throughout en route to a career worst 5.88 ERA. That winter the Red Sox brought Masterson back on a one-year prove it deal, but the lingering effects of those ailments had essentially ended his career; after being released that August Masterson never again pitched in the majors. Overall, he had almost exactly half the career of fellow burly righthanded sinker baller Derek Lowe.
Michael Bowden (2008-2009)
Bowden was the first prospect I followed who failed to make a major league impact, and thus has come to be the face of this era of flopped arms in my mind’s eye. In hindsight, his status as the top starting pitcher prospect in the Red Sox organization was probably inflated by the preceding graduations of Papelbon through Masterson and his pedigree as a first round pick in 2005; Bowden had four average pitches but no exceptional offerings, which allowed him to quickly reach AAA before stalling out as an apparent Quad-A talent. The Sox swapped him to relief after brief cups of coffee in 2009 and 2010 but he never progressed further. Bowden saw most of his big-league career as a low-leverage reliever for the 2012 and 2013 Cubs, totaling 75 replacement level innings. After that he never appeared in a major league game, though he was still playing independent ball as late as 2021.
Nick Hagadone (2008-2009)
Hagadone was another part of the Victor Martinez package, though he did not come nearly as close as Masterson to fulfilling his headlining role in that deal. Only recently returned from Tommy John at the time of the trade, the 2007 first rounder struggled to progress as a starter and (like Bowden) converted into a low leverage reliever. Unlike Bowden, Hagadone did not even provide replacement level production, bouncing between Cleveland to Triple A Columbus for several years before being nontendered in 2015.
Junichi Tazawa (2009*)
Sox fans will best remember Tazawa for his role as Uehara’s set up man in 2013, but he had originally been signed by the Red Sox as a starter in December 2008. Injuries and ineffectiveness had forced the move to the bullpen before 2012, but this of course was more than a mere salvage attempt—Tazawa was one of the better relievers in baseball for the next four seasons, appearing in 240 games with an even 3.00 ERA and even more lights-out peripherals (9.1 K/9 against a mere 1.8 BB/9). He lost his effectiveness by the second half of 2015, but it seems safe to say that Tazawa represents the upper echelon of Red Sox pitching prospects since 2007.
Casey Kelly (2008-2010)
Kelly was actually drafted in the first round as a two-way player in 2008, but after about a season and a half of terrible hitting at the lowest levels, the Sox agreed to Kelly’s preference to be a full-time pitcher. A rocky 2010 debut at Single A did not deter the Padres from making him half the headlining return for Adrian Gonzalez before the 2011 season (the other half being Anthony Rizzo). Kelly dominated AA ball that year, and had reached the majors by late 2012, winning his first start with six shutout innings against the Braves. However, from there it was all downhill, as he struggled through September, tore his UCL the next spring, made an abbreviated return in 2014 before injuries once again wiped out the rest of his season, and tried switching to relief in order reduce the strain on his arm. While ostensibly healthier, Kelly struggled mightily in the upper minors and began bouncing from organization to organization before his professional career in America ended in 2018. Since then, he’s been one of the best starters in the Korean baseball league, so he may yet have a Ryan Vogelsong-esque twist to his career.
Stolmy Pimentel (2009-2011)
Despite his fantastic name, was never more than your typical intriguing arm signed out of the DR as a teenager. Sox Prospects gave his ceiling as either a back of the rotation starter or decent late reliever; as it was, Pimentel never gained more than a series of brief appearances on a major league roster (primarily for the 2013 and 2014 Pirates). His most worthwhile contribution for the Red Sox came when he was traded to Pittsburgh (alongside Mark Melancon and two throw ins) for all-star closer Joel Hanrahan and some light-hitting middle infielder named Brock Holt.
Anthony Ranaudo (2010-2014)
Ranaudo is yet another first round pick who failed to make it, but unlike Bowden and Hagadone he was highly regarded across baseball as a top prospect. Having fallen to the 39th overall pick due to concerns over an elbow injury in college, he steadily worked his way to majors despite a lost 2012 season, debuting with seven starts in the last two months of the 2014 season. Unfortunately, that’s as good as it got for Ranaudo as despite excellent numbers in the minors he failed to impress at the big league level and was swapped to the Rangers that winter for Robbie Ross. A mediocre 2015 at Triple A wiped off more of his former luster and after spending most of 2016 in the White Sox organization Ranaudo was done in American pro ball. Like Kelly, he tried salvaging his career in Korea; unlike Kelly he flunked out after a single season, which did indeed mark the end of his professional pitching career. Ranaudo never developed a viable third offering to complement his fastball and curve, and this likely was the largest factor in his failure to fulfill the hype.
Felix Doubront (2010-2011)
Between Masterson and Houck, Doubront is the closest the Red Sox have come to developing a starting pitcher for themselves. Signed as sixteen-year-old in 2004, Doubront slowly worked his way up the major league level, usually repeating each course along the way. Promoted several times through the second half of 2010, he made a generally favorable impression, though issues with command prompted questions of making him a reliever. A poor 2011 at Triple A brought up concerns about both his work ethic and long-term prospects. Nonetheless, when injuries and ineffectiveness forced the Red Sox to turn to Doubront as a rotation mainstay in 2012 the Venezuelan southpaw stood strong and mostly met the challenge, providing 161 innings of average pitching. He would do much the same in the miracle year of 2013, but in neither season was he more than an acceptable fourth starter. When the wheels fell off in 2014 so did Doubront’s career; he was traded to the Cubs at the deadline for a player to be named later (later to be named Marco Hernandez). Since his control was never more than poor, Doubront’s career could not long survive a K/9 below 8. He appeared in his last major league game in 2015 at the age of 27.
Matt Barnes (2011-2015)
Part of that legendary 2011 Red Sox draft class, Barnes featured a classic fastball/curveball combination. Injuries, inconsistency, and the failure to add a third pitch equal to those first two led to a conversion to relief, though in this case he has more in common with Tazawa than Bowden and Hagadone. Barnes had three solid seasons then made the all-star team in 2021 as a closer, which earned him a three-year extension. Unfortunately, long-standing confidence issues and (again) injury led to a fall as swift as his rise; Barnes pitched poorly after the break and through 2022 before being dumped on the Marlins in a swap of fading relievers. Right now, he’s working out of Washington’s bullpen.
Henry Owens (2012-2015)
Like Matt Barnes, Henry Owens was drafted by the Sox in 2011. Unlike Barnes, Owens stayed a starter throughout his professional career. He tore through the minor leagues, reaching AAA by the time he was old enough to drink, en route to an extended major league audition in 2015. At first glance, Owens did not pitch too poorly—his peripherals were average, as were his results (4.57 ERA in sixty-three innings). But the Red Sox (now under Dave Dombrowski) were unimpressed with his stuff and sent him back to AAA for 2016, where he again did well. In five starts in the majors that year Owens was admittedly smacked around, but given his track record up until that point you could still envision him earning at least a back of the rotation spot if granted the opportunity. Unfortunately, he started struggling with command, getting sent all the way back to AA ball, was waived to Arizona and then the Dodgers in a matter of weeks. Owens pitched in only five more professional games before spending a final few years in independent ball.
Until doing research for this post, I would have thought of Owens in the same class as Ranaudo or Bowden; now I think of him as being closer to Blake Swihart—a former first round pick from 2011 who worked his way to the majors by 2015, did well in his rookie year, then was dislodged by the new regime, his apparent faults exaggerated in order to explain why he was being shafted. Look, if Owens was ever going to become a major league pitcher, it was not going to happen in AAA, just as Swihart was never going to become a better catcher by breaking his ankle in the outfield. The fourth and fifth starters for the Red Sox in 2016 were Clay Bucholz and Drew Pomeranz; Owens’ 2015 was just as good if not better than what those two “provided” and he was considerably cheaper, too.
Allen Webster (2012-2014)
Webster came to the Red Sox organization through that August 2012 megadeal with the Dodgers that sent Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford and Nick Punto west. That trade was primarily a salary dump, but Webster (with fellow pitching prospect Rubby de la Rosa) had some potential. Of course, he never actually fulfilled this potential; if Owens was the guy with results better than his stuff, then Webster was the guy who’s stuff was better than his unexceptional results. He crested with a couple of decent years at AAA, bombed in abbreviated big league action, and ended his career in Cubs organization…for those keeping count, that’s the fourth failed Red Sox pitching prospect later acquired by the Theo/Hoyer Cubs (Bowden, Kelly, and Doubront being the other three). Webster and Owens also had stints in Mike Hazen’s Diamondbacks.
Brandon Workman (2013-2014)
Also known as “Matt Barnes at home,” Workman was a college righthander with a good fastball/curveball combination who never developed a viable third pitch and wound up in the bullpen as a result (2015 Tommy John surgery didn’t help). Workman only had one good season out of the ‘pen, which you probably remember Chaim Bloom was somehow able to spin into Nick Pivetta. What you may not remember is that Workman was released by the Phillies after 2020 only to be signed by the Cubs—that’s right, he’s the fifth Theo/Hoyer expat.
Brian Johnson (2014-2016)
Brian Johnson had one of the unluckiest careers of any pitcher mentioned here. A big southpaw drafted out of Florida in 2012’s first round, Johnson had the solid repertoire of the stereotypical crafty lefty starter. Unfortunately, his professional career was one freak mishap after another—a line drive to the face during the 2012 Futures’ game in Fenway meant he couldn’t eat solid food for months, let alone keep in shape, which led to a shoulder injury at the start of 2013. When he was finally healthy, Johnson cut a swath through minor league hitting, most notably a 1.75 ERA in 118 innings at AA which was followed by 2.53 ERA the next year at AAA and his major league debut…whereupon an elbow injury ended his season early. Latent anxiety issues then started plaguing Johnson, even threatening to end his career at one point. He came back, of course, and will be best remembered as the swingman for the greatest team in Red Sox franchise history.
Michael Kopech (2015-2016)
Kopech shouldn’t actually be listed here due to my criteria, but he deserves a mention as part of the trio of prospects that brought Chris Sale to Boston. With a peak velocity of 102mph, Kopech’s heater could only ever be matched by his personality—in his first pro season, he was suspended fifty games for using a banned substance. Ok, that stuff happens, maybe he really did just accidentally take a tainted supplement as he claimed—and then the next March he broke his hand punching his roommate. Kopech’s turbulent off-field life has followed him to the big-league level: in January 2020, Kopech married Canadian actress Vanessa Morgan; in June 2020 Kopech filed for divorce, a month after the announcement that the couple were expecting their first child.
Kopech is currently the White Sox closer.
Jay Groome (2016-2022)
Groome is the classic “There’s No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect,” a first rounder who has never come close to fulfilling his selection spot due mostly to injuries. He had his first full professional season last year, making 30 starts at Triple A; he also posted a 8.55 ERA and walked seven and a half batters per nine innings.
Jalen Beeks (2017-2018)
Beeks, like Kopech, would not be here if not for his inclusion in a major trade—in this case the deal that brought Nate Eovladi over from Tampa in 2018. One of few pitchers who did not become a Cy Young Award contender immediately after putting on a Rays uniform, Beeks has been an unexceptional swingman after parts of six seasons. He started 2024 as a Rockie reliever, which is not unlike being the understudy for an extra in a high school play.
Darwinzon Hernandez (2017-2018)
Finally, we have Darwinzon Hernandez, the wild lefty reliever. Darwinzon has never walked less than four men per nine and he’s not likely to stop anytime soon. Seventy low leverage innings between the 2019 and 2021 seasons seem likely to be the extent of his major league career, as he is now a member of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks. In his sole appearance last year he faced seven batters, hitting one, walking one, striking out one, and allowing two earned runs. Bless ‘im—all the way on the other side of the world and he hasn’t changed one bit!
Conclusion
Looking back at the past fifteen years of disappointment, four distinct types of failed pitching prospects come clear:
The Reliever: Matt Barnes and Junichi Tazawa are obviously the best of this group, though you can also include Brandon Workman, Michael Kopech, and Darwinzon Hernandez. These guys had good fastballs and maybe an equal second offering but never found that third pitch that would make them a starting pitcher. Injury presumably made the decision to convert to full time relief easier.
The Never-That-Good: These pitchers were the beneficiaries of either a weak system, overhype, or both. Michael Bowden is the forefather, followed by Nick Hagadone, Stolmy Pimentel, and Allen Webster.
The Injury-Derailed: Casey Kelly is the clearest example, but Brian Johnson’s numbers until his 2015 MLB debut clearly reflect a higher ceiling than he reached. Jay Groome also belongs here, the sole pitcher to have never made an appearance in the big leagues.
The Deserved Better: Henry Owens, literal and spiritual batterymate to Blake Swihart.
This leaves Felix Doubront and Anthony Ranaudo as apparent exceptions, though you could place the former in the “Never-That-Good” category given his high ranking was due at least in part to coming along directly after the Papelbon-Masterson generation graduated. Ranaudo’s failure to become even a back of the rotation option is, to my understanding, nigh inexplicable even in hindsight.
If I had to hazard an educated guess on the future categorization of current Red Sox pitching prospects, I would place Mata in the Reliever group, Noah Song next to Jay Groome in Injury-Derailed. Dick Fitts, Winkelman Gonzalez, and Luis Perales all deserve more time to prove themselves before even conjecturing their projections.

A five word title that sounds like it was made by a sci fi fan fiction writer in the 80s. A pedigree of Ultima Underworld and System Shock just behind it and a wealth of ideas that had no right to be in that place and time.
The first person mech genre has never been huge but there was an era when it was much bigger than it is now. The big contender was Mechwarrior 2 in the 90s, but Heavy Gear, Earthsiege, Gungriffon were also present and there was a fanbase.
Then TerraNova comes out a year after and decides not to do everything better than the competition, but just everything. I can't find any hard numbers on the game's budget but it's been said it was a hell of a lot, and that much is obvious by the content. This game just exudes the kind of production that could never make back it's budget, (and it didn't).
It's the first real squad-based tactical shooter game. You lead a squad of AI-controlled teammates, you issue a whole range of commands , and unlike shooters where squadmates are glorified NPCs and a sufficiently skilled commander player could have them wait in a barrel and beat the level on their own, some missions are impossible to complete without their engagement.
There is also the wide open fully 3D landscape. Other shooters at the time took place in interiors and enclosed spaces only, Terra Nova took place outdoors. Other 3D games with outdoor terrain at the tame were MechWarrior, which had a flat terrain with unclimbable boulders strewn here and there, and flight simulators that had a lower level of ground detail (higher graininess). TN had hills, valleys, rivers, lakes and islands, and no part of the terrain was flat. And it was vast. In theory you could walk for hours; in practice if you left the area defined by mission parameters (which was vast) by too far, you would be called a "deserter" and the game would be over, but even at this edge of the play area there was a long long way still to the horizon.
The physics model that allowed for the suits and the weapons to behave differently on different terrain, under different weather conditions, and different gravities (missions take place on several planets / moons).
That and the variety of on-the-fly customization in the HUD that allowed you to pick the best view for any given situation. It was similar to the HUD in System Shock, also by the same studio.
Then there is the story...but it's more useful to talk about it as the worldbuilding. Yes this has the same slightly awkward FMV presentation as the wing commander games but damn did they really lean into it. A fully realised world of conflicting political theories and detailed timelines, the players squad consists of FIFTEEN members each with their own live actor and full bio, and then SEVENTEEN reserve members on top of that. Because it didn't make back it's insane budget it wasn't able to have the sequels that were originally planned. But the game is so vast and rich it feels like a series all on it's own.
This game couldn't run on most standard hardware for the time, which earned it some understandable criticism, but today there is nothing stopping you from playing this 1996 marvel of ambition and creative triumph.

24-minute read. Չկարդացողի վրա նաֆս ա դրած․

Historical Armenia vs. Real Armenia

PM PASHINYAN: The debates held in parliament since 2021 can be described as a clash of two Armenias: historical Armenia and real Armenia. This began after the 2020 war because prior to that, there was a political consensus in Armenia that Historical and Real Armenias could co-exist and strengthen each other. This perception was sweet to the ears of the public and political leaders, including myself. My administration's political and psychological transformation out of this mentality happened publicly, in front of you. I believe that Historical and Real Armenia are incompatible and pose a serious threat to each other.
Because of the influence of Historical Armenia, we realized only in 2022 that the primary tool for the protection of Armenia was ignored for decades, starting from our independence day and that this tool was the internationally recognized border of Armenia and the internationally recognized territories. After the September 2022 war I became convinced that the confirmation of Armenia's internationally recognized territories can become a tool for short, medium, and long-term security. That is when we changed our political-psychological approach; we began to delimit the borders of Historical Armenia and Real Armenia. This mental delimitation is even more difficult than the delimitation of the AM-AZ border.
Historical Armenia is refusing to recognize the territorial integrity of Real Armenia because the latter is a "limiting" factor. Historical Armenia, knowingly or unknowingly, has joined forces with several countries that want to destroy Real Armenia's independence and territorial integrity. Historical Armenia is feeding long-term enmity with a group of countries and gives them an excuse to be aggressive against Real Armenia. Historical Armenia also wants us to be unable to live independently and wants us to always rely on a guarantor or a senior comrade, so we won't have a real state, a real independence.
The vision of Historical Armenia will always lead us to a genocide trap and will force us to seek a savior, and the threat of possible genocide will keep us as a fortpost [Note: Armenia was commonly referred to as Russia's "fortpost" in South Caucasus in the past]. A fortpost doesn't need a border, sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity; it only needs a sponsor state.
Notice how since our independence we have always been resistant and self-defensive to the idea of "territorial integrity". This was caused by Historical Armenia. We didn't notice at the time that some of our friends were subtly feeding those feelings. They were feeding something that put Real Armenia's territory at risk.
As the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, I feel obligated to tell you that we must focus on serving the interests of Real Armenia. We can never again return to the mentality of Historical Armenia, otherwise, Real Armenia won't have a chance to address external security threats.
What is Real Armenia? It is Armenia that has an internationally recognized territory and internationally recognized borders, and the understanding that it is a full and legitimate member of the international community. This entails certain conduct that is within international law. Even if your neighbor violates these international norms, that doesn't mean we should. You get to decide whether to live with rules or without. If you choose without rules, others can do the same to you. Your decision to follow international law is an additional mechanism that can help protect you.
Real Armenia is an internationally recognized 29,743 km² country - the Republic of Armenia. This isn't new for the international community because they have long recognized our 29,743. As ridiculous as it may sound, it was actually us who were refusing to recognize and accept our territory for a long time, driven by social-psychological factors. The time has come to do it, to ensure the long-term existence of Armenia. The time has come for Armenians to recognize the territorial integrity of the Republic of Armenia.
The world cannot provide "guarantees" to Armenia. This is why it is paramount for Armenia to adopt the strategy of controlling and neutralizing threats. For this to happen, Armenia must adopt a legitimate stance and have legitimate demands.
We are not against launching the border delimitation process with Azerbaijan starting from the 4 villages on the border between Tavush and Gazakh regions. We are often asked whether this delimitation will be a "guarantee" for future security or a "guarantee" that Azerbaijan will later return the territories of 31 Armenia villages. It cannot "guarantee" security or "guarantee" future transfers of Armenian lands, but the refusal to address this issue will, on the other hand, guarantee security issues for Armenia and will guarantee that Azerbaijan will not return the territories of 31 villages. We must neutralize this threat.

... Pashinyan about the Nagorno-Karabakh negotiation process, post-Lisbon, Russia's coup attempt in Armenia:

Armenians sacrificed thousands of soldiers and endured losses to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Armenia. It is worth reminding you again that the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh was closed by the international community in 1996 in Lisbon, and from that point, Armenia became the real target. They recognized Nagorno-Karabakh as a de jure part of Azerbaijan in Lisbon by declaring that Nagorno-Karabakh cannot have a status outside Azerbaijan. But certain countries began to feed false hopes to Armenia that Nagorno-Karabakh could someday be an independent state, and they maintained the conflict and used it as a collar around Armenia's neck, or "pavadok" [Russian word], if you will. The events around the negotiation table after 2016 were not about finding a resolution to the conflict, they were about tightening the collar around Armenia's neck. They used the situation to eliminate Armenia's ability to act as an independent state. Not suppress that ability, but to completely eliminate it, because the suppression began in 1996-1998.
We didn't choose their route [Nagorno-Karabakh concessions in 2018-2020] so the geopolitical centers familiar to you decided to resolve the issue by force. They launched the 2020 war. By "issue" I mean Armenia because as I've already said, they had decided that Nagorno-Karabakh was part of Azerbaijan in 1996. The only issue that was left was Armenia; they wanted to incite internal civilian clashes and a military coup in Armenia. By the way, this scenario was possible before the 2020 war, and it was attempted towards the end of the war and after the ceasefire. The population's wisdom is what prevented this scenario from materializing, while our soldiers sacrificed their lives to preserve Armenia's independence and statehood.
Thanks to the soldiers' sacrifices and the transition from Historical Armenia to Real Armenia, we are able to preserve our independence and statehood today. There were several attempts to end Armenia's independence:
The first one happened on November 9-10, 2020, accompanied by the attempted murder of Parliament Speaker Ararat Mirzoyan, and the hijacking of government and parliament buildings. In February 2021, they made an unsuccessful attempt to organize a military coup. We have learned some lessons and must enact additional mechanisms to prevent the politicization of armed forces.
The second attempt to end Armenia's independence was made in May 2021. Days after I resigned and the parliament was dismissed to trigger snap elections, the Azerbaijani army invaded Armenia in the Sotk-Khoznavar direction. At the time, there were forces in Armenia who were demanding us to launch an armed response against Azerbaijan in order for, according to them, "the CSTO to be able to come help us." These forces were attempting to convince us that Armenia HAD to launch a military response in order to legally authorize CSTO to act. This was false, the CSTO agreement states otherwise. Only later we learned that CSTO wanted to enter Armenia not as an ally to help, but as a "peacemaker". They practically exclude Armenia from the defense mechanism.
Had we listened to the emotional calls by these forces to attack Azerbaijan, things could have unfolded the following way: Armed clashes deep within the territory of Armenia, the canceling of the parliamentary elections, the absence of the government that had just resigned, the entry of CSTO not as an ally but as peacekeepers, formation of a puppet regime and the end of Armenian statehood.
This was averted once again thanks to the statehood-oriented mindset of the Armenian people, who responded positively to the ruling party's calls. In those difficult times, we were able to hold elections described by the international community as "democratic" and "free". Despite all the negative predictions, the people voted for the same force behind the 2018 revolution. They gave the mandate to the Real Armenia.
The de jure reaffirmation of Real Armenia happened as a result of the September 2022 war, when it became obvious that the 1996-1998 collar wrapped around Armenia's neck was being used to drag Real Armenia to the execution room to behead its independence and statehood. This is when we made very important decisions in Prague in October 2022. Armenia and Azerbaijan recognized each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty based on the 1991 Almaty Declaration, which means the administrative Soviet borders at the time of its collapse became the state borders. The second important agreement in Prague was to delimit the borders based on the Almaty Declaration, which means Armenia and Azerbaijan won't form a new border, and that the existing border will be reproduced on the ground. It's very important that the president of Azerbaijan has recently reaffirmed the agreements reached in Prague and Almaty. This can be a basis for long-term peace and stability if we adopt this route.
The third important outcome of the Prague meeting was the deployment of the EU border monitoring mission. Its mandate was extended by 2 years. We are discussing another 2-year extension. The Prague meeting was crucial for achieving stability in the region and for a realistic and legitimate program for peace.
The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, played a crucial role in reaching the agreements in Prague. Today, the targeting of Macron and France is unacceptable for me and the Government of Armenia.
If Macron is being singled out and targeted for giving a long-term mandate to the EU border mission in Armenia, the critics must remember that this decision was made unanimously in the EU. I'd like to thank the leaders of every EU state for responding to Armenia's request to deploy the mission.
This civilian monitoring mission by the EU has gathered objective facts from the AM-AZ border for the EU and the international community. We want the EU and its partners to be informed about border facts. This will prove that Armenia is committed to the peace agenda and the Prague agreements.
I highly value the April 5 AM-EU-US meeting. The meeting didn't have a defense component but do know that the EU and US would have never agreed to provide economic support to Armenia if they thought Armenia had aggressive intentions. The April 5 meeting destroyed the narratives in the West that Armenia was pursuing a policy of aggression.
The April 5 social-economic-political meeting was unprecedented in its nature and importance. The EU and US have expressed political support for Armenia's sovereignty, democracy, and territorial integrity.
The EU and US value the post-2018 reforms in democracy, justice, and anti-corruption. They vowed to continue to support Armenia with more reforms.
The EU and US expressed readiness to expand their cooperation in the areas of political reforms, economic development, mobility, effective governance, law, transportation, communication, nuclear and other energy, aviation safety, and technologies. They want to help increase Armenia's resilience.
The EU and US have announced support for strategic investments in Armenia in the areas of transportation infrastructure, digitization, energy, development of businesses, and job creation.
The EU and US have welcomed and supported the Crossroads of Peace initiative, which will promote regional prosperity and diversification.
The EU and US have vowed to support our forcefully displayed brothers and sisters from Nagorno-Karabakh with housing and careers.
This shows the political scale and importance of the April 5 meeting. It marked a new level in our relations.
What was the April 5 meeting NOT about? It wasn't about the EU and US coming and solving all of our problems. This is important to say out loud because people often expect certain "allies" to come and solve our problem for us. Change your mindset if you want our problems to be solved, and realize that only Armenians must resolve Armenian problems because these are OUR problems. This is part of having sovereignty and independence. You must understand your problems and be willing to resolve them. The alternative is to be someone's vassal or fortpost. Overcome that mentality.
The deepening of our relations with the EU and US is not done against our regional relations.
Historical Armenia is a tool in the hands of others to deprive Armenia of its independence and development. The Real Armenia is the Republic of Armenia, and the Homeland is the State of Armenia. Armenia must improve and develop relations with its neighbors. European countries, too, were in the past warring against each other.
Azerbaijan continues to use aggressive rhetoric against Armenia, provokes on the borders, maintains the occupation of Armenian territories, and continues to acquire large volumes of arms. Azerbaijan complains about the new border fortifications and arms purchases by Armenia, but it is our sovereign right to have them, and we also agree that we shouldn't have an arms race. We have offered Azerbaijan to form a mutual oversight of armament, mirrored withdrawal of troops from the state border (which would, by the way, solve the issue of 4 villages raised by Azerbaijan), demilitarization of border areas, deployment of border guards and withdrawal of armed forces to their permanent bases. Azerbaijan has so far not accepted these offers but we hope they will respond positively to our 8th amendment to the peace agreement which we sent them on March 14. I also hope to reach an agreement, at least partially, in the border areas of Tavush [partial = delimit only those 4 villages]. This would reduce the tensions.
Armenia and Azerbaijan must be mindful of their rhetoric because hostility breeds hostility.
Armenia has special relations with Iran, based on natural interests. The strengthening of our relations with the West was/is/will not be against Iran. Similarly, our relationship with Iran has never and will never be against the West.
2 of our 4 neighbors have received an EU candidacy. I congratulate Georgia on this occasion. As for Turkey, we are in an anticipation phase, we are waiting for the limited opening of the border. It would be a historical event. I'm talking about Armenia-Turkey relations, not Armenian-Turkish relations. This is a difference that Armenian people often overlook.
To conclude the topic about the region, I must sadly note that certain external forces, while pursuing their own political-military interests, are attempting to distort Armenia's external policies in an attempt to draw dividing lines in our region. Armenia has adopted the policy of external diversification. We want to strengthen relations not only with the West, but also with India, China, South Korea, and Japan.
We also marked a historical event in 2023: Armenia and Saudi Arabia established diplomatic relations. This was also part of our diversification policy.
The biggest event of 2023 and in our modern history was the ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh. Starting from December 2022 and throughout 2023, I gave dozens of speeches in which I spoke about the illegal blockade of the Lachin Corridor and the impending ethnic cleansing and depopulation. This is why we cannot rely on "guarantees" from the international community or de jure allies. Sadly, the political elites of Nagorno-Karabakh never grew to understand that as the elected leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh, they had to assume responsibility for finding solutions, otherwise no one could help them. The international community can only help so much; most of the work must be done by the subject, that is of course if the subject wants to be a subject.
I must emphasize again that what happened in Nagorno-Karabakh was part of the attempt to bring Armenia's statehood to its knees. The 2023 ethnic cleansing was the continuation of November 2020, February 2021, May 2021, and September 2022. During the 2023 ethnic cleansing, they attempted to drag the Republic of Armenia into a major war, create a political crisis in Yerevan, topple the legitimate government, and appoint a marionette regime that would proceed to sign the dissolution of Armenia.
It didn't work yet again for several reasons. (1) Armenian people once again exercised a state-oriented mentality and accepted the governing party's assessments. I'd like to thank the people again for supporting the large flow of the forcibly displaced persons. (2) Our forcibly displaced brothers and sisters from Nagorno-Karabakh refused to join and carry out the foreign plan against Armenia. In recent years, by the way, these forces were preparing the Nagorno-Karabakh for that purpose, through hybrid and direct methods. These forces were instilling hatred towards the Republic of Armenia and the Armenian government in the hearts of Nagorno-Karabakh residents. I respect our brothers and sisters forcibly displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh for also respecting the Armenian statehood at a very difficult time. Sadly I can't say the same for certain members of Nagorno-Karabakh political elites who are refusing to end the hateful propaganda. There can be no second "government" in Armenia. Armenia has one Parliament and one Government. (3) The next thing that derailed the anti-state campaign was our decision to provide housing and other subsidies to refugees. None of these would have been possible had our government not strengthened Armenia's institutions and their resilience in 2021-2023. This surprising level of stability was disappointing to some. Today we are working on a long-term housing solution for refugees, including with the help of our international partners. Again, our international colleagues aren't going to solve our problems for us, we must do most of the work. The more we work, we more international support we will receive.
I'd like to thank the taxpayers and those who work and create in Armenia, whether you are a citizen or a foreigner. They are the strongest pillar of Real Armenia. They are what feed and nurture independence and statehood. Over 13,000 forcibly displaced brothers and sisters from Nagorno-Karabakh have found employment in Armenia; I'd like to ask our brothers and sisters from Nagorno-Karabakh to contribute to the strengthening of Armenia's economy and statehood.
I'd like to talk about Armenia-Russia relations. Obviously, these aren't the best times in our relations, but we cannot overestimate the historical importance of AM-RU relations in Armenia's economy and security. Our Russian colleagues cannot point to a single event, a single decision by my administration, that caused this worsening of relations. Armenia has not violated any of the allied responsibilities. Sadly, the same cannot be said about Russia.
We don't want to "argue" with Russia. Not only because we don't have the resources and strength for that, but because we value the positive angles of our relations. But it's also important to have a deep understanding of what is happening in AM-RU relations. In my view, what is happening is that we are switching from Historical Armenia-Russia relations to Real Armenia-Russia relations. This can be as painful as our internal transformation from Historical Armenia to Real Armenia, but this is happening and everything must be done to ensure this AM-RU transformation is positive. We are ready to discuss this with Russia. During my first meeting with Vladimir Putin in May 2018, we reached an agreement that Armenia and Russia would respect each other's sovereignty, statehood, and interests. I'm ready for this type of dialogue.
Every decision and policy by us must serve the best interests of Real Armenia. We have crossed a very important part of this road, but the road continues. In 2018 after we became the government, it was important for me to formulate our mission. Here is how we formulated it: Change the historical cycle of Armenia. Armenia's cycle was to gain independence during the fall of empires and lose independence during the restoration of empires. This happened to Historical Armenia at least 5 times. We must end this cycle. That is our mission. The change must come from us, from our mindset. To end the cycle we must transition from Historical Armenia to Real Armenia. This is happening right now, right here. Glory to the martyrs, and glory to the Republic of Armenia. Kecce Republic of Armenia. //
source,

Pashinyan about the pro-Russian leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh, how they opposed the Western-backed negotiations in 2023 under external pressure, autonomy and secession for salvation

PASHINYAN: We have information, we have evidence, that a group of Nagorno-Karabakh representatives presented their opinion [before September 2023] during various discussions that certain things would happen if they chose the path that they did. There was no practical response by [today's] Nagorno-Karabakh leadership, they didn't present their own plan. Today, other evidence suggests that they might have planned to hijack power in Armenia.
The opposition forces in Armenia were cheering the political changes in Nagorno-Karabakh [Changes = the ousting of "Pashinyan's puppet" President Arayik Harutyunyan who was open to Western negotiation platform]. Those who resigned in Nagorno-Karabakh were, at least, issuing warnings about the risks. The new leaders were unable to respond adequately. That put an end to everything.
There was an opportunity to launch a dialogue with Azerbaijan on a European platform. Do you know why Nagorno-Karabakh didn't send a representative? Because someone PROHIBITED them from doing so. Prohibited. And it wasn't I who prohibited them, and it could not have been me. They were prohibited.
The international community agreed that Nagorno-Karabakh residents must have a right to self-determination, but they didn't mean an "independent republic", as evident from Lisbon. After the 2016 clashes and changes to the negotiation documents, at best, Nagorno-Karabakh could have a status/autonomy within Azerbaijan and be jointly controlled by ethnic Armenians and ethnic Azeris. I had to "lower the bar" from "independent republic" to "autonomy" in order to receive international support, but not everyone was ready for it. We had to lower the bar and exercise the right to autonomy, which could one day pave the way to secession for salvation. There are no Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh today because we didn't want to accept the basic reality, we didn't want to see an autonomous Nagorno-Karabakh part of Azerbaijan jointly controlled by Armenians and Azeris, even though that's what was on the table after 2016. //
source, source,

Pashinyan responds to the maps submitted by Serj Sargsyan to the UN

April 2 news has context.
PASHINYAN: We are investigating the circumstances and the facts behind the decision to submit those maps. The last one was submitted in 2013. It's very strange that not a single record of the process of sending the map to the UN was preserved at the foreign ministry. The investigation continues. //
source,

Pashinyan is waiting for Azerbaijan to confirm a map to launch the delimitation process in Tavush

REPORTER: If the border delimitation commissions have not reached an agreement around the maps yet, if Azerbaijan is refusing to accept the maps and we don't know the edition of the maps that will be used, why have we agreed to launch the process from Tavush?
PASHINYAN: Until we reach an agreement around the map, around this section of the border, the process cannot begin.
REPORTER: Is there an agreement with Azerbaijan to launch the delimitation from Tavush, or did you launch this topic in order to prevent a war?
PASHINYAN: We do not have an agreement yet but we aren't against the idea. It is in Armenia's best interest to reaffirm our border on the ground in Tavush.
REPORTER: But we are talking about a unilateral action if Azerbaijan doesn't agree and there are no maps for delimitation.
PASHINYAN: If both sides fix that this is the border of Armenia and Azerbaijan, it can't be a unilateral process. We do not have an agreement yet to launch the process from this section of Tavush.
REPORTER: If Azerbaijan doesn't agree to the delimitation process but demands the 4 ghost villages anyway, is it possible you will return them just to avoid a war?
PASHINYAN: First, it's 3 territories, not 4, and they are only partially under Armenian control. Second, it's impossible to do it without reaching an agreement on where the border is.
REPORTER: Why is Azerbaijan refusing to launch the delimitation from Tavush?
PASHINYAN: I can't say that Azerbaijan has refused or accepted it.
REPORTER: If there is no agreement, why did you rush to launch this public discussion and why did you visit the border villages to tell them that the process will begin from there soon?
PASHINYAN: There was a meeting held by the border delimitation commissions. They discussed a wide range of topics, including this topic. As I've said, considering the prior experiences and after analyzing the criticism [of him not being upfront about the need to make Nagorno-Karabakh concessions before 2020 to avoid war], I decided that it was necessary to make this process transparent and discuss it with the public. Nothing has been decided on the Tavush border yet. I will hold a new meeting with nearby border villagers when there are new developments.
source, source, source, source, Robert Kocharyan and Tavush,

infrastructure for debt

RULING MP: The EU has decided to provide €2.6+0.3 billion to Armenia. We are grateful. My question is about Kocharyan's decision to hand over Armenia's infrastructure to Russia in exchange for debt. We gave Russia 5 strategic objects in exchange for $93 million. Hrazdan JEK alone was/is worth $1 billion. Isn't it time to repay our debt to Russia and receive our infrastructure back? These facilities have already generated a massive profit for Russia.
PASHINYAN: What people who complain about the size of €270 million additional aid don't understand is that the EU and US are helping Armenia to be more self-sufficient so we won't have to receive handouts. We are cooperating in nuclear energy, aviation safety, agriculture, literally every sector is included. The EU and US have the technologies necessary for Armenia's development. That's the topic of discussion. The previous €2.6 billion program hasn't disappeared but we must present programs before they give us money. That is not an easy process. Today we have money but don't even have the capacity to build schools.
RULING MP: About Russia and our infrastructure.
PASHINYAN: We've held discussions around this topic with Russia. We aren't trying to take the facilities back but we want Russia to make investments in them. Some of them were shut down and neglected.
RULING MP: It is great that you are negotiating with them. The Mars factory's territory, for example, would be great for our IT industry. There used to be 7,000 employees there.
PASHINYAN: We discussed the Mars factory as well. I discussed that topic with [PM Mishustin]. It's a giant industrial territory, only a fraction of which is in use today. It needs to work at full capacity and serve our economy.
source,

Kremlin hopes that Pashinyan and Putin will be able to meet soon to discuss "all the issues in the AM-RU relations"

source,

Armenia and Russia were unable to reach an agreement to address the broadcasting violations by Russian state channels

Armenia recently banned the Russian state propagandist Vladimir Solovyov from Armenia's public multiplex for anti-Armenia content. The major private cable TV operators voluntarily joined the ban.
High-Tech Minister Mkhitaryan says before the ban Armenia sent a delegation to Russia to discuss the AM-RU broadcasting agreement but they were unable to resolve the issues because the Russian side refused to acknowledge the violations.
Armenia will send an amended version of the AM-RU media agreement next week to revise the existing one. It will give more powers to the Armenian regulator to sanction programs in violation of the AM-RU agreement.
The High-Tech Minister did not rule out the possibility of Armenia unilaterally revoking the agreement if Russia rejects the amendment proposals.
source,

"as a last resort" Russia could sanction countries that ban our MIR payment cards: Russia's Central Bank chief Nabiulina

Russia's central bank says it's in the best interest of other states to accept the card because it serves tourists. Russian tourists account for half of all foreign tourists in Armenia but it's still unclear what impact the MIR ban will have on their spending habits.
source,

Pashinyan was asked about an attempt by Russian agents in Armenia to "abduct" a Russian citizen accused of draft evasion in Russia

PASHINYAN: A Russian citizen attempted to leave Armenia through the Zvartnots airport. Since Russia had placed him on the wanted list, he wasn't allowed to fly, and he was detained by Armenian police. Since the warrant didn't include an "arrest", he was freed in Armenia. Now we're trying to locate him. //
It was later revealed that Armenian lawyers met the Russian man at the military base in Gyumri. During the private meeting, the man said it was his will to return to Russia and that he "regretted" his actions.
source, source,

interview with United States Ambassador Kristina Kvien

REPORTER: Is it true that the US plans to join the EU border observation mission in Armenia?
KVIEN: No.
REPORTER: Will you deliver weapons?
KVIEN: The US and Armenia have had an active and robust discussion on defense, especially over the last year. Last year we held our first joint military exercises since 2008. We will send an adviser to Armenia's defense ministry to increase capacities, especially since Armenia is interested in expanding its presence in peace programs. We will help with internal reforms and the modernization of Armenia's defense ministry.
REPORTER: [GOT ANY WEAPONS?]
KVIEN: We have an ongoing discussion about what Armenia might need in the military sector. We have reached an agreement on a few things. Armenia has asked for armored ambulance vehicles so they can enter a zone of conflict and evacuate people. We have reached an agreement and we are working on the implementation. As I've said, there are all sorts of discussions about Armenia's defense needs.
full interview coming tomorrow,

a document lists the war crimes committed by Azerbaijan along with 1,500 links and sources

Prepared by the Center for Truth and Justice (CFTJ).
the document, source, source,

border guards exchange fire after Armenian shepherd allegedly accidentally ends up on Azerbaijani territory

An Armenian shepherd accidentally crossed into Azerbaijan while searching for his lost flock. According to Azeris, an Azeri border agent approached the Armenian shepherd. The events escalated into a shootout, resulting in one injury on the Azerbaijani side.
The Armenian side will investigate how the flock ended up on the Azerbaijani side and the circumstances that led to the opening of fire, and they urged the Azerbaijani side to launch a similar investigation.
ARMENIA's NSS: The question of how and why the shepherd and his flock crossed the border is also being clarified. We also note that the Azerbaijani side has returned the lost flock. The shepherd is also on the territory of Armenia. Such incidents are undesirable for the Armenian side.
AZERBAIJAN: Our border agents noticed the illegal crossing by two Armenians who drove 200 sheep 300 meters into Azerbaijan. Our agents tried to prevent the violation but came under fire from the Armenian armed forces.
ARMENIAN RESIDENT (lives near border): The shepherd is from the village Tegh; it happened not far from us. He has lots of dogs. The dogs attacked the Azeri border guards, then I heard gunfires [another source says Azeris opened fire towards the shepherd, which might have triggered a response by the Armenian side].
VILLAGE MAYOR: The shepherd did not leave the territory of Armenia. The Azeri soldiers were positioned too close.
source, source, source, source,

Iran (re)authorizes the transfer of Armenian cattle through its territory

Armenian and Iranian delegations met last week to discuss a set of issues such as the opening of pedigree cattle breeding centers, joint production of vaccines, and construction of a quarantine checkpoint for transit transportation of cattle and veterinary services.
source, source,

anti-corruption: authorities charge customs agents with assisting large-scale tax evasion

ACC: Two customs inspectors at Bagratashen checkpoint conspired with several truck drivers, causing ֏700M in damage to the state. The truck drivers imported cargo from Iran and declared it "for re-export", but they dumped the cargo in Armenia and crossed into Georgia with empty trucks. The goods remained in Armenia and were used for commercial purposes. 15 suspects are charged, including 2 customs agents and 13 drivers. //
source,

authorities uncover an attempt to smuggle $500,000 worth of cocaine from the US to Armenia

Someone hid the narcotics in a parcel full of clothing. The agents discovered and confiscated it but decided to bust the entire crime chain so they replaced cocaine with another powder and delivered it to the recipient. Two suspects were arrested.
source, video,

housing program for refugees

RULING MP: The government will soon provide large subsidies to Nagorno-Karabakh refugees to acquire permanent housing. How will this sudden increase in demand affect housing prices, and what toolset do you have for controlling the prices?
MINISTER: We do not have any tools to control the prices; it's driven by supply and demand. The prices of existing housing units are expected to rise. However, we are taking several steps to reduce the impact:
(1) We'll give an option for refugees to build a house instead of buying one. If property owners jack up the prices, the recipients might find it more beneficial to use their checks to build their own. Moreover, in many communities, they'll receive additional subsidies if they build the houses there.
(2) The housing subsidies will be distributed gradually. It will reduce the financial stress on the government and allow the priority group, which includes 4,100 families with 3 or more children, to be the first recipients. There are a total of 20,000 families or potentially 25,000; the exact number will be revealed when we verify the actual number of families that are in need of social housing assistance.
source, source, source,

Armenian government sent a delegation to Georgia to examine their experience with visa liberalization with the EU

They discussed biometric passports, data security, visas, etc.
source,

Education Minister Andreasyan about the Academic City

QUESTION: When?
MINISTER: The plan will be ready in June. The German architects will hold a meeting in Matenadaran to present more details very soon. The first students are expected to study at the Academic City starting in 2030. It will be a gradual transition starting with Arts, Tech, Pedagogy, and Military.
QUESTION: What about private universities?
MINISTER: The Academic City is primarily for state universities, up to 8 of them, but the area is large and it can house another 8 private or foreign universities as well. Several private universities have already shown interest in having their spot. We held separate talks with foreign universities and formed a Working Group. I recently visited the site of the Academic City with the rector of the French University and the French Ambassador to Armenia; they plan to expand their activities and have a presence at the Academic City. The area will be large and there is room for everyone who wishes to join.
source,

Rwandan youth are performing Armenian dances: VIDEO

folk,
modern,
more,