Creative Alliance seeks a part-time Box Office Assistant to act as an ambassador for Creative Alliance, assist patrons, and help with day to day operations of the box office (ticket sales, administrative projects, etc). We are looking for someone who is enthusiastic and truly believes in Creative Alliance’s mission. This position mainly consists evening and weekend hours during performances, screenings, and special events. We are looking for someone who is comfortable working in a fast paced environment, while still able to put the customer experience first.

The Creative Alliance is Baltimore’s premier multi-arts venue with a mission to present and promote artists, performers and filmmakers; engage diverse audiences; and improve the quality of life in Baltimore City through community based arts and education programs.

The Creative Alliance seeks an Education Coordinator to join our team.

The following are illustrative tasks and outcomes for the Education Coordinator. Each year as the Creative Alliance defines its action plan, the deliverables for this position will be aligned with our strategies.

• The con-artist will contact you via email and ask you if you are interested in participating in a survey or job assignment. 
• If you reply that you are interested, the con-artist will mail you a check for an amount of money, ask you to deposit the money in your bank account, and immediately wire all but $200 of the money back to them. 
• Once you wire the money out to the con-artist, the con-artist will have your money and you will no longer hear from them.
• A few days later, your bank will tell you that the check has bounced and take the money back. You are then left with the loss of the money that you wired out and no way to reach the con-artist.
  

If you have received one of these messages, do not wire the money to the con-artist.  As soon as you wire the money to the con-artist, the money is gone.  Just stop responding to the con-artist.

If you are a victim and have sent money to the con-artists, please file a criminal complaint with the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center.  They can be reached at the following web address:  https://www.ic3.gov/complaint/default.aspx

Mark Cather / UMBC Chief Information Security Officer

The New York Times Carlos Slim’s blog got caught in a lie today about Donald Trump’s military service.

The Times’ bloggers Steve Eder and David Phillips write:

Many men of Mr. Trump’s age were looking for ways to avoid the war, said Charles Freehof, a draft counselor at Brooklyn College at the time, noting that getting a letter from a physician was a particularly effective option.

“We had very little trouble with people coming back saying, ‘They wouldn’t accept my doctor’s note,’” Mr. Freehof said.

Mr. Trump had a 1-Y classification, which was considered a temporary exemption. But in practice, only a national emergency or an official declaration of war, which the United States avoided during the fighting in Vietnam, would have resulted in his being considered for service.

Neither occurred, and Mr. Trump remained 1-Y until 1972, when his status changed to 4-F, permanently disqualifying him.

“For all practical purposes, once you got the 1-Y, you were free and clear of vulnerability for the draft, even in the case of the lottery,” Mr. [Richard] Flahavan [of the Selective Service] said.

Did you catch that slight of hand there?

Their whole argument is based on the assumption that TRUMP did  something to move his classification, which was not the case. SAD!

The suggestion is that Trump wanted out of the draft. The real story is that the 1-Y category was discontinued in December 1971 and all 1-Y candidates were automatically made 4-F. The Chicago Tribune wrote about it on November 3, 1971 in an article titled, “Draft Kills 1Y Classification; New Board Rules Established.”

The Times’ bloggers were either too lazy or too stupid to find this obvious change.

“A major change not required by law wipes out the catchall 1Y classification that lumped together men with borderline physical disqualifications, homosexuals, criminals and a variety of others. From now on a man in this area will be given 4F as physically unfit, 1A-RR1, meaning being adjudicated, 1A-AO, meaning acceptance undetermined.”

In other words Trump was put into the 1Y category because of his foot injury, and was absolutely the reason he was reclassified to 4F. Note the phrase “borderline.” It’s important. It means that Trump wasn’t lying when he said the following to the Times’s bloggers.

Still, Mr. Trump, in the interviews, said he believed he could have been subject to another physical exam to check on his bone spurs, had his draft number been called. “I would have had to go eventually because that was a minor medical — it was called ‘minor medical,’” he said.

But the publicly available draft records of Mr. Trump include the letters “DISQ” next to his exam date, with no notation indicating that he would be re-examined.

The Times lied; Trump told the truth.

Donald Trump has said that he is planning to bar the New York Times from his events. He should. Their interests and his interests aren’t aligned.

The Times, backed as it is by a Mexican-Lebanese billionaire like Carlos Slim, doesn’t have Trump’s (or America’s) interests at heart. He has his own. Trump’s goal of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico would adversely affect Slim’s interests. If Slim got really hurt by renegotiating NAFTA he might have still less money to lavish on his journalism hobby and a whole lot of New York Times reporters would be out of work. More than have currently lost their jobs. The Times’s skin in the game is toward a more globalist world view. Trump has the opposite interests. He wants to “Make America Great Again.”

We’ve focused a lot on the New York Times’s lying bloggers at GotNews.com. We exposed how they lied about how Judge Curiel’s parents became citizens when they didn’t. And we’ve pointed out that the gay “reporter” sent to smear Trump on his rapport with women makes things up. To say nothing of the numerous hoaxes we’ve exploded largely to Trump’s benefit.

The more interesting question is why Trump and so many of Trump’s staffers continue to grant the Times and other anti-Trump publications interviews at all and why he hasn’t used the opportunity of this election to build a new media through the access Why hasn’t Milo Yiannopoulos introduced Trump at one of his rallies? Why doesn’t he mention that he has read Ann Coulter’s book Adios America? Why doesn’t Trump openly endorse Paul Ryan’s opponent Paul Nehlen when Ryan has gone around blacklisting Trump to the donors?

My bet is on inner circle squeamishness. At the GOP convention in Cleveland I was told by a Trumpian that GotNews.com and yours truly was on a media blacklist because GotNews.com associates with the alt right. Perish the thought! You mean we’d actually freely associate with the guys that we were winning? Where on earth would we get that that might be a good idea?

Of course we’ve always been fair to Trump at GotNews.com. Indeed, I wrote a piece about why Trump was going to do well for Takimag back in July of last year. I was already thanking Trump for all that he has done to shift the Overton Window on political discourse.

When I wrote for other publications Donald Trump routinely linked me  — I learned the power of the big Twitter — but now that I’ve gone independent he hasn’t. That’s a shame but we’ve done well despite that lack of links. He might expose more people to GotNews.com and continue to reward his friends as he harms his enemies. Alas! (It’s much the same with Drudge. He has no problem linking people who steal GotNews.com but has linked GotNews.com only once or twice. Sad!)

If you want to continue to help fund GotNews.com please donate and we’ll use the money to continue doing research that changes the conversation. If you want to join our pro-Trump research group, email me at editor@gotnews.com.

The meta-purpose of this draft story is for the New York Times’s bloggers to stress that Donald Trump hasn’t sacrificed for

Maybe we’re all tired of sacrificing for stupid missionary wars or at the expense of hectoring, lecturing foreigners who tell us how to run our country.

Not Mr. Khazr Khan, though. His son made the sacrifice. In addition to writing about sharia law his immigration law practice would be adversely affected should Trump win. Good.

Trump has a “black soul” Khan says. Trump has a “dark” view of the world. Good.

It’s about time our leaders spoke to us as fellow citizens and our media told us the truth about the difficulties ahead.

"One of Europe's biggest flea markets, in the northern French city of Lille, has been cancelled because of security fears after recent Islamist violence.

The Grande Braderie de Lille attracted 2.5 million visitors last year and had been due to be held on 3-4 September.

Lille's mayor, Martine Aubry, said cancelling the event had been a "painful decision" but there were "risks we cannot reduce".

It is among several events dropped since the lorry attack in Nice in July."

My own thoughts:

I don't blame them for cancelling. That's the rational choice.

I blame them for allowing their own colonization by Muslim invaders at the cost of their own traditions and culture.

Europe will remember or it will cease to be as we know it.

Manil Suri is one of just 15 leading experts worldwide awarded a prestigious academic residency for September 2016 at the The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy. During the upcoming residency, Suri, a professor of mathematics, will work on his current book project, The Godfather of Numbers.

As an arts and literary arts resident, Suri is now part of a 56-year legacy that includes Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, artists, social entrepreneurs, and activists and the selection is recognition of his ability to promote the well-being of humanity around the world.

The residency program is made up of leading academics, artists, thought leaders, policymakers, and practitioners who have been recognized for their bold thinking and promise to further change the world for the better.

“The Foundation’s Bellagio Residency Program has a track record for supporting the generation of important new knowledge addressing some of the most complex issues facing our world, and innovative new works of art that inspire reflection and understanding of global and social issues,” according to a description about the program on the Rockefeller Foundation’s website.

In a short biography announcing September’s Bellagio residents, the foundation states: “Suri’s The Godfather of Numbers is a novel that aims to posit mathematics as the basis of all creation with The Godfather of Numbers as the narrator who initiates a mathematical big bang to create the counting numbers out of nothingness. His foremost objective for the book is to create a compelling piece of fiction and to allow readers an entry into the world of mathematics which does not assume mathematical expertise. While bringing out mathematics’ playful aspects for a wide target audience, he also wants to provide insight into how it works invisibly in so much of the universe. Mathematics is a much-maligned and poorly understood subject, and he hopes the book is a step towards reducing the anxiety surrounding it.”

Read more about residency program on The Rockefeller Foundation’s website. For more on Manil Suri’s previous books, visit his author website and to learn more about his teaching and research, visit his UMBC website.

Image: Manil Suri. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. 

The devastating flash flood that hit Ellicott City, Maryland, last Saturday night was so severe that meteorologists called it a once-in-a-thousand-years event. What conditions colluded to transform a quaint main street into a torrent of water in a matter of minutes? The Washington Post and WAMU radio both turned to Jeffrey Halverson, professor of geography and environmental systems, to explain.

Air currents from across the region converged over Ellicott City “in a manner that would literally squeeze moisture out of the atmosphere,” wrote Halverson in the Post. The extremely high humidity meant there was plenty to squeeze out. But what made it even worse was the large amount of buoyant energy feeding updraft currents. The more energy, “the more water vapor is lofted into the clouds and processed as rain,” says Halverson.

On top of that, a process called “back-building convection” resulted in several storm cells moving through the area, creating a much longer-lasting event than the traditional summer thunderstorm.

Perhaps the scariest part, though, is that even the most sophisticated computer models cannot predict the exact location of these events. “It becomes a ‘now-casting’ exercise,” says Halverson, “and there is almost never any lead time.”

But it’s not only the meteorological conditions that are to blame for the devastation Saturday night. “The flood was as much about the nature of the underlying land surface as it was about the large amount of rain falling from the sky,” Halverson told WAMU. The narrow streets, large amount of pavement, and valley geography of Old Ellicott City make it especially vulnerable to a flash flood.

“Ellicott City happened to be ground zero for a process that had very laser-like focus,” Halverson explained. “Humble rain, often gentle, is life-sustaining, nourishing, and thus benign 99 percent of the time,” he says. “But what we take for granted sometimes quickly turns deadly.”

UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski and Provost Philip Rous reached out to the UMBC community following the storm, expressing condolences to the families of two individuals who lost their lives, one of whom was an employee at University of Baltimore. Pres. Hrabowski also called on campus experts, like Halverson, to “share their knowledge and resources to help address issues to reduce future flood risk in the area.”

Recovery is a major, long-term process, but one that the area’s residents are already supporting through donations and volunteer service. As Pres. Hrabowski shared, “Ellicott City is a part of us.”

Image: Damage in Ellicott City following the July 31 flash flood; Brian Krista, Baltimore Sun Media Group.