GOLDEN RETRIEVER Not pictured: a goddamn golden retriever. GOLDEN RETRIEVER

The radiant summer sidewalk outside Southeast Stark juice caf Canteen seems too exposed an environment to be talking with Portland experimental duo Golden Retriever. The contents of the music created by Jonathan Sielaff and Matt Carlson are dark, cerebral, and brooding. One imagines they make the kind of sounds that must be conjured from deep, contemplative wellsprings, originating from somewhere buried or hidden. A listen to RotationsGolden Retrievers ninth release, and the third for Thrill Jockey Recordsdoes little to assuage this notion.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sielaff and Carlsons sunny dispositions belie, but also mimic, the dramatic arcs of their music, and the bright weather, cold drinks, and steady procession of street traffic morphs into an ambiance more fitting than first suspected.

We play weird music, in one sense, offers Sielaff. But were never trying to alienate people. Its very much about engaging anyone whos listening in any way we can.

We both like art that has extreme contrasts in it, adds Carlson. A simple, beautiful melody is more profound when juxtaposed with something thats harsh and dissonant, where you can really feel the tension and resolution happening.

Rotations acts as an end product for a project Sielaff and Carlson began in 2015. Enabled by a grant from Portlands Regional Arts and Culture Council, Golden Retriever found themselves able to fund a more expansive vision of their experimental ideas by incorporating a full chamber ensemble for a live performance at the Old Church. Prior to the performance, the two improvised and built musical structures from acoustic piano and bass clarinet, and then transcribed notations of string and percussion arrangements for the larger ensemble to perform live. They then took the recordings of their pre-performance sketches, and added post-production improvisation and collage layering to create something entirely new.

The musical language and the chemistry generated between Sielaff and Carlson over the years reveal themselves in myriad ways on Rotations. There is a jarring, challenging nature to compositions like Thirty-Six Stratagemsa nightmarish, haunting piece that tests the depths of your sanity in intriguing ways. Conversely, the meditative finale Sunsight meanders in bleary piano plunks, weeping violins, and twinkling vibraphone in what amounts to a soft farewell.

For Sielaff and Carlson, the methods they use to conjure their expansive soundscapes, however inventive, are less important for their artistic satisfaction than the lassoing of the emotional, spiritual, and cathartic currents that gurgle in every corner of their music. As human beings, we have all those things going on inside of us at all times anyway, says Sielaff. Were making human music.

Its an interesting critical challenge with instrumental music: What is it talking about? says Carlson. How is it saying what its saying? I dont have answers. Thats why I like to work in the area I do. Were at a stage where, to us, its out in the world landing in peoples brains, and thats whats interesting to me.

Even when people dont like it, its really interesting to hear why, says Sielaff. Usually those people volunteer those opinions.

A story is both told and heard, with equal parts given and received. The humanism of any art exposes the recipient as the final ingredient to its magic. With Rotations, Golden Retriever has once again made you an equal partner in their craft.

Link:

Heavy Rotation: Golden Retriever's Spellbinding New LP - The Portland Mercury

My mother recently found piles of my notebooks from when I was a small child that were filled with plans for my future. I was very ambitious. I wrote out what I would do at every age: when I would get married and when I would have kids and when I would open a dance studio.

When I left my small hometown for college, this sort of planning stopped. The experience of going to a radically new place, as college was to me, upended my sense of the world and its possibilities. The same thing happened when I moved to New York after college, and a few years later when I moved to Istanbul. All change is dramatic for provincial people. But the last move was the hardest. In Turkey, the upheaval was far more unsettling: after a while, I began to feel that the entire foundation of my consciousness was a lie.

For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones. This indifference is particular to the psychology of white Americans and has a history unique to the US. In recent years, however, this national identity has become more difficult to ignore. Americans can no longer travel in foreign countries without noticing the strange weight we carry with us. In these years after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the many wars that followed, it has become more difficult to gallivant across the world absorbing its wisdom and resources for ones own personal use. Americans abroad now do not have the same swagger, the easy, enormous smiles. You no longer want to speak so loud. There is always the vague risk of breaking something.

Some years after I moved to Istanbul, I bought a notebook, and unlike that confident child, I wrote down not plans but a question: who do we become if we dont become Americans? If we discover that our identity as we understood it had been a myth? I asked it because my years as an American abroad in the 21st century were not a joyous romp of self-discovery and romance. Mine were more of a shattering and a shame, and even now, I still dont know myself.

I grew up in Wall, a town located by the Jersey Shore, two hours drive from New York. Much of it was a landscape of concrete and parking lots, plastic signs and Dunkin Donuts. There was no centre, no Main Street, as there was in most of the pleasant beach towns nearby, no tiny old movie theatre or architecture suggesting some sort of history or memory.

Most of my friends parents were teachers, nurses, cops or electricians, except for the rare father who worked in the City, and a handful of Italian families who did less legal things. My parents were descendants of working-class Danish, Italian and Irish immigrants who had little memory of their European origins, and my extended family ran an inexpensive public golf course, where I worked as a hot-dog girl in the summers. The politics I heard about as a kid had to do with taxes and immigrants, and not much else. Bill Clinton was not popular in my house. (In 2016, most of Wall voted Trump.)

We were all patriotic, but I cant even conceive of what else we could have been, because our entire experience was domestic, interior, American. We went to church on Sundays, until church time was usurped by soccer games. I dont remember a strong sense of civic engagement. Instead I had the feeling that people could take things from you if you didnt stay vigilant. Our goals remained local: homecoming queen, state champs, a scholarship to Trenton State, barbecues in the backyard. The lone Asian kid in our class studied hard and went to Berkeley; the Indian went to Yale. Black people never came to Wall. The world was white, Christian; the world was us.

We did not study world maps, because international geography, as a subject, had been phased out of many state curriculums long before. There was no sense of the US being one country on a planet of many countries. Even the Soviet Union seemed something more like the Death Star flying overhead, ready to laser us to smithereens than a country with people in it.

I have TV memories of world events. Even in my mind, they appear on a screen: Oliver North testifying in the Iran-Contra hearings; the scarred, evil-seeming face of Panamas dictator Manuel Noriega; the movie-like footage, all flashes of light, of the bombing of Baghdad during the first Gulf war. Mostly what I remember of that war in Iraq was singing God Bless the USA on the school bus I was 13 wearing little yellow ribbons and becoming teary-eyed as I remembered the video of the song I had seen on MTV.

And Im proud to be an American

Where at least I know Im free

That at least is funny. We were free at the very least we were that. Everyone else was a chump, because they didnt even have that obvious thing. Whatever it meant, it was the thing that we had, and no one else did. It was our God-given gift, our superpower.

By the time I got to high school, I knew that communism had gone away, but never learned what communism had actually been (bad was enough). Religion, politics, race they washed over me like troubled things that obviously meant something to someone somewhere, but that had no relationship to me, to Wall, to America. I certainly had no idea that most people in the world felt those connections deeply. History Americas history, the worlds history would slip in and out of my consciousness with no resonance whatsoever.

Racism, antisemitism and prejudice, however those things, on some unconscious level, I must have known. They were expressed in the fear of Asbury Park, which was black; in the resentment of the towns of Marlboro and Deal, which were known as Jewish; in the way Hispanics seemed exotic. Much of the Jersey Shore was segregated as if it were still the 1950s, and so prejudice was expressed through fear of anything outside Wall, anything outside the tiny white world in which we lived. If there was something that saved us from being outwardly racist, it was that in small towns such as Wall, especially for girls, it was important to be nice, or good this pressure tempered tendencies toward overt cruelty when we were young.

I was lucky that I had a mother who nourished my early-onset book addiction, an older brother with mysteriously acquired progressive politics, and a father who spent his evenings studying obscure golf antiques, lost in the pleasures of the past. In these days of the 1%, I am nostalgic for Walls middle-class modesty and its sea-salt Jersey Shore air. But as a teenager, I knew that the only thing that could rescue me from the Wall of fear was a good college.

I ended up at the University of Pennsylvania. The lack of interest in the wider world that I had known in Wall found another expression there, although at Penn the children were wealthy, highly educated and apolitical. During orientation, the business school students were told that they were the smartest people in the country, or so I had heard. (Donald Trump Jr was there then, too.) In the late 1990s, everyone at Penn wanted to be an investment banker, and many would go on to help bring down the world economy a decade later. But they were more educated than I was; in American literature class, they had even heard of William Faulkner.

When my best friend from Wall revealed one night that she hadnt heard of John McEnroe or Jerry Garcia, some boys on the dormitory hall called us ignorant, and white trash, and chastised us for not reading magazines. We were hurt, and surprised; white trash was something we said about other people at the Jersey Shore. My boyfriend from Wall accused me of going to Penn solely to find a boyfriend who drove a Ferrari, and the boys at Penn made fun of the Camaros we drove in high school. Class in America was not something we understood in any structural or intellectual way; class was a constellation of a million little materialistic cultural signifiers, and the insult, loss or acquisition of any of them could transform ones future entirely.

In the end, I chose to pursue the new life Penn offered me. The kids I met had parents who were doctors or academics; many of them had already even been to Europe! Penn, for all its superficiality, felt one step closer to a larger world.

Still, I cannot remember any of us being conscious of foreign events during my four years of college. There were wars in Eritrea, Nepal, Afghanistan, Kosovo, East Timor, Kashmir. US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed. Panama, Nicaragua (I couldnt keep Latin American countries straight), Osama bin Laden, Clinton bombing Iraq nope.

I knew Saddam Hussein, which had the same evil resonance as communism. I remember the movie Wag the Dog, a satire in which American politicians start a fake war with foreign terrorists to distract the electorate during a domestic scandal which at the time was what many accused Clinton of doing when he ordered a missile strike on Afghanistan during the Monica Lewinsky affair. I never thought about Afghanistan. What country was in Wag the Dog? Albania. There was a typical American callousness in our reaction to the country they chose for the movie, an indifference that said, Some bumblefuck country, it doesnt matter which one they choose.

I was a child of the 90s, the decade when, according to Americas foremost intellectuals, history had ended, the US was triumphant, the cold war won by a landslide. The historian David Schmitz has written that, by that time, the idea that America won because of its values and steadfast adherence to the promotion of liberalism and democracy was dominating op-ed pages, popular magazines and the bestseller lists. These ideas were the ambient noise, the elevator music of my most formative years.

But for me there was also an intervention a chance experience in the basement of Penns library. I came across a line in a book in which a historian argued that, long ago, during the slavery era, black people and white people had defined their identities in opposition to each other. The revelation to me was not that black people had conceived of their identities in response to ours, but that our white identities had been composed in conscious objection to theirs. Id had no idea that we had ever had to define our identities at all, because to me, white Americans were born fully formed, completely detached from any sort of complicated past. Even now, I can remember that shiver of recognition that only comes when you learn something that expands, just a tiny bit, your sense of reality. What made me angry was that this revelation was something about who I was. How much more did I not know about myself?

It was because of this text that I picked up the books of James Baldwin, who gave me the sense of meeting someone who knew me better, and with a far more sophisticated critical arsenal than I had myself. There was this line:

But I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life.

And this one:

All of the western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the west has no moral authority.

And this one:

White Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any colour, to be found in the world today.

I know why this came as a shock to me then, at the age of 22, and it wasnt necessarily because he said I was sick, though that was part of it. It was because he kept calling me that thing: white American. In my reaction I justified his accusation. I knew I was white, and I knew I was American, but it was not what I understood to be my identity. For me, self-definition was about gender, personality, religion, education, dreams. I only thought about finding myself, becoming myself, discovering myself and this, I hadnt known, was the most white American thing of all.

I still did not think about my place in the larger world, or that perhaps an entire history the history of white Americans had something to do with who I was. My lack of consciousness allowed me to believe I was innocent, or that white American was not an identity like Muslim or Turk.

Of this indifference, Baldwin wrote: White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded.

Young white Americans of course go through pain, insecurity and heartache. But it is very, very rare that young white Americans come across someone who tells them in harsh, unforgiving terms that they might be merely the easy winners of an ugly game, and indeed that because of their ignorance and misused power, they might be the losers within a greater moral universe.

In 2007, after I had worked for six years as a journalist in New York, I won a writing fellowship that would send me to Turkey for two years. I had applied for it on a whim. No part of me expected to win the thing. Even as my friends wished me congratulations, I detected a look of concern on their faces, as if I was crazy to leave all this, as if 29 was a little too late to be finding myself. I had never even been to Turkey before.

In the weeks before my departure, I spent hours explaining Turkeys international relevance to my bored loved ones, no doubt deploying the cliche that Istanbul was the bridge between east and west. I told everyone that I chose Turkey because I wanted to learn about the Islamic world. The secret reason I wanted to go was that Baldwin had lived in Istanbul in the 1960s, on and off, for almost a decade. I had seen a documentary about Baldwin that said he felt more comfortable as a black, gay man in Istanbul than in Paris or New York.

When I heard that, it made so little sense to me, sitting in my Brooklyn apartment, that a space opened in the universe. I couldnt believe that New York could be more illiberal than a place such as Turkey, because I couldnt conceive of how prejudiced New York and Paris had been in that era; and because I thought that as you went east, life degraded into the past, the opposite of progress. The idea of Baldwin in Turkey somehow placed Americas race problem, and America itself, in a mysterious and tantalising international context. I took a chance that Istanbul might be the place where the secret workings of history would be revealed.

In Turkey and elsewhere, in fact, I would feel an almost physical sensation of intellectual and emotional discomfort, while trying to grasp a reality of which I had no historical or cultural understanding. I would go, as a journalist, to write a story about Turkey or Greece or Egypt or Afghanistan, and inevitably someone would tell me some part of our shared history theirs with America of which I knew nothing. If I didnt know this history, then what kind of story did I plan to tell?

My learning process abroad was threefold: I was learning about foreign countries; I was learning about Americas role in the world; and I was also slowly understanding my own psychology, temperament and prejudices. No matter how well I knew the predatory aspects of capitalism, I still perceived Turkeys and Greeces economic advances as progress, a kind of maturation. No matter how deeply I understood the USs manipulation of Egypt for its own foreign-policy aims, I had never considered and could not grasp how American policies really affected the lives of individual Egyptians, beyond engendering resentment and anti-Americanism. No matter how much I believed that no American was well-equipped for nation-building, I thought I could see good intentions on the part of the Americans in Afghanistan. I would never have admitted it, or thought to say it, but looking back, I know that deep in my consciousness I thought that America was at the end of some evolutionary spectrum of civilisation, and everyone else was trying to catch up.

American exceptionalism did not only define the US as a special nation among lesser nations; it also demanded that all Americans believe they, too, were somehow superior to others. How could I, as an American, understand a foreign people, when unconsciously I did not extend the most basic faith to other people that I extended to myself? This was a limitation that was beyond racism, beyond prejudice and beyond ignorance. This was a kind of nationalism so insidious that I had not known to call it nationalism; this was a self-delusion so complete that I could not see where it began and ended, could not root it out, could not destroy it.

In my first few months in Istanbul, I lived a formless kind of existence, days dissolving into the nights. I had no office to go to, no job to keep, and I was 30 years old, an age at which people either choose to grow up or remain stuck in the exploratory, idle phase of late-late youth. Starting all over again in a foreign country making friends, learning a new language, trying to find your way through a city meant almost certainly choosing the latter. I spent many nights out until the wee hours such as the evening I drank beer with a young Turkish man named Emre, who had attended college with a friend of mine from the US.

A friend had told me that Emre was one of the most brilliant people he had ever met. As the evening passed, I was gaining a lot from his analysis of Turkish politics, especially when I asked him whether he voted for Erdoans Justice and Development party (AKP), and he spat back, outraged, Did you vote for George W Bush? Until that point I had not realised the two might be equivalent.

Then, three beers in, Emre mentioned that the US had planned the September 11 attacks. I had heard this before. Conspiracy theories were common in Turkey; for example, when the military claimed that the PKK, the Kurdish militant group, had attacked a police station, some Turks believed the military itself had done it; they believed it even in cases where Turkish civilians had died. In other words, the idea was that rightwing forces, such as the military, bombed neutral targets, or even rightwing targets, so they could then blame it on the leftwing groups, such as the PKK. To Turks, bombing ones own country seemed like a real possibility.

Come on, you dont believe that, I said.

Why not? he snapped. I do.

But its a conspiracy theory.

He laughed. Americans always dismiss these things as conspiracy theories. Its the rest of the world who have had to deal with your conspiracies.

I ignored him. I guess I have faith in American journalism, I said. Someone else would have figured this out if it were true.

He smiled. Im sorry, theres no way they didnt have something to do with it. And now this war? he said, referring to the war in Iraq. Its impossible that the United States couldnt stop such a thing, and impossible that the Muslims could pull it off.

Some weeks later, a bomb went off in the Istanbul neighborhood of Gngren. A second bomb exploded out of a garbage bin nearby after 10pm, killing 17 people and injuring 150. No one knew who did it. All that week, Turks debated: was it al-Qaida? The PKK? The DHKP/C, a radical leftist group? Or maybe: the deep state?

The deep state a system of mafia-like paramilitary organisations operating outside of the law, sometimes at the behest of the official military was a whole other story. Turks explained that the deep state had been formed during the cold war as a way of countering communism, and then mutated into a force for destroying all threats to the Turkish state. The power that some Turks attributed to this entity sometimes strained credulity. But the point was that Turks had been living for years with the idea that some secret force controlled the fate of their nation.

In fact, elements of the deep state were rumoured to have had ties to the CIA during the cold war, and though that too smacked of a conspiracy theory, this was the reality that Turkish people lived in. The sheer number of international interventions the US launched in those decades is astonishing, especially those during years when American power was considered comparatively innocent. There were the successful assassinations: Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1961; General Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, also in 1961; Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, in 1963. There were the unsuccessful assassinations: Castro, Castro, and Castro. There were the much hoped-for assassinations: Nasser, Nasser, Nasser. And, of course, US-sponsored, -supported or -staged regime changes: Iran, Guatemala, Iraq, Congo, Syria, Dominican Republic, South Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina. The Americans trained or supported secret police forces everywhere from Cambodia to Colombia, the Philippines to Peru, Iran to Vietnam. Many Turks believed that the US at least encouraged the 1971 and 1980 military coups in Turkey, though I could find little about these events in any conventional histories anywhere.

But what I could see was that the effects of such meddling were comparable to those of September 11 just as huge, life-changing and disruptive to the country and to peoples lives. Perhaps Emre did not believe that September 11 was a straightforward affair of evidence and proof because his experience his reality taught him that very rarely were any of these surreally monumental events easily explainable. I did not think Emres theory about the attacks was plausible. But I began to wonder whether there was much difference between a foreigners paranoia that the Americans planned September 11 and the Americans paranoia that the whole world should pay for September 11 with an endless global war on terror.

The next time a Turk told me she believed the US had bombed itself on September 11 (I heard this with some regularity; this time it was from a young student at Istanbuls Boazii University), I repeated my claim about believing in the integrity of American journalism. She replied, a bit sheepishly, Well, right, we cant trust our journalism. We cant take that for granted.

The words take that for granted gave me pause. Having lived in Turkey for more than a year, witnessing how nationalistic propaganda had inspired peoples views of the world and of themselves, I wondered from where the belief in our objectivity and rigour in journalism came. Why would Americans be objective and everyone else subjective?

I thought that because Turkey had poorly functioning institutions they didnt have a reliable justice system, as compared to an American system I believed to be functional it often felt as if there was no truth. Turks were always sceptical of official histories, and blithely dismissive of the governments line. But was it rather that the Turks, with their beautiful scepticism, were actually just less nationalistic than me?

American exceptionalism had declared my country unique in the world, the one truly free and modern country, and instead of ever considering that that exceptionalism was no different from any other countrys nationalistic propaganda, I had internalised this belief. Wasnt that indeed what successful propaganda was supposed to do? I had not questioned the institution of American journalism outside of the standards it set for itself which, after all, was the only way I would discern its flaws and prejudices; instead, I accepted those standards as the best standards any country could possibly have.

By the end of my first year abroad, I read US newspapers differently. I could see how alienating they were to foreigners, the way articles spoke always from a position of American power, treating foreign countries as if they were Americas misbehaving children. I listened to my compatriots with critical ears: the way our discussion of foreign policy had become infused since September 11 with these officious, official words, bureaucratic corporate military language: collateral damage, imminent threat, freedom, freedom, freedom.

Even so, I was conscious that if I had long ago succumbed to the pathology of American nationalism, I wouldnt know it even if I understood the history of injustice in America, even if I was furious about the invasion of Iraq. I was a white American. I still had this fundamental faith in my country in a way that suddenly, in comparison to the Turks, made me feel immature and naive.

I came to notice that a community of activists and intellectuals in Turkey the liberal ones were indeed questioning what Turkishness meant in new ways. Many of them had been brainwashed in their schools about their own history; about Atatrk, Turkeys first president; about the supposed evil of the Armenians and the Kurds and the Arabs; about the fragility of their borders and the rapaciousness of all outsiders; and about the historic and eternal goodness of the Turkish republic.

It is different in the United States, I once said, not entirely realising what I was saying until the words came out. I had never been called upon to explain this. We are told it is the greatest country on earth. The thing is, we will never reconsider that narrative the way you are doing just now, because to us, that isnt propaganda, that is truth. And to us, that isnt nationalism, its patriotism. And the thing is, we will never question any of it because at the same time, all we are being told is how free-thinking we are, that we are free. So we dont know there is anything wrong in believing our country is the greatest on earth. The whole thing sort of convinces you that a collective consciousness in the world came to that very conclusion.

Wow, a friend once replied. How strange. That is a very quiet kind of fascism, isnt it?

It was a quiet kind of fascism that would mean I would always see Turkey as beneath the country I came from, and also that would mean I believed my uniquely benevolent country to have uniquely benevolent intentions towards the peoples of the world.

During that night of conspiracy theories, Emre had alleged, as foreigners often did, that I was a spy. The information that I was collecting as a journalist, Emre said, was really being used for something else. As an American emissary in the wider world, writing about foreigners, governments, economies partaking in some larger system and scheme of things, I was an agent somehow. Emre lived in the American world as a foreigner, as someone less powerful, as someone for whom one newspaper article could mean war, or one misplaced opinion could mean an intervention by the International Monetary Fund. My attitude, my prejudice, my lack of generosity could be entirely false, inaccurate or damaging, but would be taken for truth by the newspapers and magazines I wrote for, thus shaping perceptions of Turkey for ever.

Years later, an American journalist told me he loved working for a major newspaper because the White House read it, because he could influence policy. Emre had told me how likely it was I would screw this up. He was saying to me: first, spy, do no harm.

Main photograph: Burak Kara/Getty Images for the Guardian

Adapted from Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World by Suzy Hansen, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 15 August

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Unlearning the myth of American innocence - The Guardian

Ive decided to think about my beliefs in terms of how I live rather than what my unconscious assumptions are. Because there are lots of people that have all sorts of beautiful beliefs that live really awful lives. If Im on the side of a road bleeding, I dont care if the priest or the Levite have beautiful beliefs about the poor and the hurting Give me the Samaritan. The heretic. The outsider who may have the wrong beliefs in words and concepts but actually lives out the right beliefs by stopping and helping me. Thats the kind of belief Im interested in at this point. Michael Gungor

I came across this quote earlier on a friends facebook post.

Growing up in Alabama I had to come to terms with the fact I held what many considered to be the wrong beliefs. While I enjoyed working to help others I didnt want to proselytize to those who were often at their lowest point. I often say I believe in the power of good human beings working to help each other and I just wanted to leave it at that.

It was a dream come true for me to discover the Humanist Service Corps.

(image credit to Foundation Beyond Belief)

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The Right Thing About the Wrong Beliefs - Patheos (blog)

99% of Cryptocurrencies are total scams. And, yes, Cryptocurrencies are in a bubble.

BUTthe opportunity is NEVER going away and generational wealth will be made. So you have to know the basics, why this opportunity even exists and what to watch out for.

Heres the problem. Theres around 900 different cryptocurrencies that exist, with new ones being created every week.

I can tell you for sure: 95% of the cryptocurrencies are scams or Ponzi schemes. And I get questions every day: Is XYZ currency a scam? And nobody listens to the answer.

Everyone is convinced they are right. Thats a bad sign. I always tell myself Im the dumbest person in the room. Then I call the smarter people and ask them lots of questions. And then I read everything I can. And in this case, I read the code.

But the opportunity is immense. Think, Internet 1994. Right before the right before.

BC will stand for Before Crypto and AC will stand for After Crypto. We are in AC right now and the world is about to change.

Ive never written about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies before. But theres a reason I want to start now.

Were in a hype bubble.

It doesnt mean cryptos or bad. It doesnt mean you shouldnt buy. It just means.theres a lot of hype and scammers out there. Weve seen this story at least twice before in past 20 years and many people have gotten hurt.

Ive been actively involved in investing in Cryptocurrencies since 2013 (I sold my book, Choose Yourself in a Bitcoin-only store I created a month before I released it on Amazon). And for the past 18 months Ive participated in various ICOs (Internet Coin Offerings) that are all doing well.

I say this just to establish some credentials. I will be writing more frequently about cryptocurrencies simply because I see so many people I know starting to be hurt when, in fact, theres opportunities to make a lot of money in the space.

A simple cryptocurrency transaction looks like this:

A) James wants to send Joe 10bitcoin.

B) James has 100 bitcoins that he has gotten from 500 people who, in turn, got from 10,000 people, and on and on back to the very firstbitcointransaction.

C) James puts together a transaction (technically complicated but simply described as a transaction) and sends it out onto the block chain.

D) A block is a list of transactions.

E) enough miners confirm that the transactions in a block are legit (all of the inputs are legit and all of the outputs are legit. The merchant (in this case, Joe ) can decide how much validation he needs.

F) the bitcoins get transferred

Every step above is much more complicated, but for a reason.

A) a standardized and neutral confirmation policy backed by software that has no human agendas.

Imagine I want to send Joe dollars to buy his house.I need to trust all of the middlemen between Joe and me: local bank, central bank, lawyers, governments, Joes bank, etc to approve of this transactionif I do it in dollars.

This is ok but at each step someone can be untrustworthy. They are all humans, even the government (humans subtly influence the price of the dollar and also share details of the transaction with unfriendly parties (the IRS)).

Also, each step in the above has a transaction cost. So inflation is built into the system.

If this were abitcointransaction, enough miners need to approve that this transaction is valid. So even if a few miners are not trustworthy, the bulk of them will be and we can trust that the transaction between me and Joe is legit.

[This process is complicated. Suffice to say, it works on Bitcoin and any other legit cryptocurrency.]

This is the ENTIRE reason for cryptocurrency: avoid governments, borders, middlemen, extra transaction costs. As well as have high security and avoid forgery.

(there is another reason for cryptocurrency, which is to do more complicated transactions that we can call contracts without lawyers, etc. This reason is sometimes the basis for legit ICOs).

Imagine the history of money. Money is used as a store of value OR as a way to transact without having to use a barter system.

First it was the land you owned and the resources you developed on that land (wheat, grains, etc).

Then it was metals. Gold, silver, etc. You traveled with it by fashioning it into jewelry. Too much gold = harder to travel.

Paper currency. Backed first by gold but thenfaith in God (in God we trust) or government. (Or a pyramidwith an eye in it????)

Electronic currency. Easily transportable. But transaction fees all over the system. Zero privacy.

And the next generation is Cryptocurrency. Easily transportable, little to zero transaction fees, no human intervention between payor and payee, high anonymity, and even functionality.

Money evolves, like anything else, and the natural evolution of money is always as a store of value that is easier to move, more secure, and more private.

Transactions have the same history. And the same issues. How can you transact across a far geographic area with less fees, less costs, less chance for human error, higher security and privacy.

A natural evolution leads go crypto-currency.

Theism ==> Humanism ==> Data-ism

Think about every industry in human history:

Theism: A country planning on going to war would make sacrifices to their gods. Would pray. And would surrender to the fact that whosever god was stronger would win.

Humanism: More people, more bullets, more human intelligence, equals the winner in a war.

Data-ism: This is the war being fought every day right now. We saw tiny snapshot of it with the election but its only a snapshot in a ten year long movie.

The war is on every single day. Its fought in every country. Its fought with data and hacking and piracy.

Theism: Shamans and priests would pray for health or do rituals to enhance health.

Humanism: The doctor knocks your knee, puts hand on head, take two aspiring and call me in the morning

Data-ism: Bloodwork, DNA work, robotic surgeries, fMRIs, Catscans. Statistical matching with massive database of similar scans to do diagnosis. All medicine is starting to be outsourced to data.

Theism: In God We Trust

Humanism: Lets throw a President on there. Lets get the signature of the Secretary of Treasury up there. Dont worry, were good for it. While we print a few trillion without telling anyone.

Data-ism: The natural evolution: Cryptocurrency.

Does this mean Bitcoin is The winner. Buy bitcoin?

No. It just means the natural evolution of currency is arriving and nothing will stop it.

Decentralized. So no one government entity can quietly mint money for their own purposes and have access to your transactions, accounts, etc.

Security. So nobody can forge or steal your money.

Privacy. Your transactions cant be seen and reported to other entitles.

Functionality. This is the more technical parts of the blockchain in Cryptocurrencies but suffice to say some of the intrinsic value of a coin is the functionality and computational power used to mine that functionality.

Theres not going to be ONE winner.

Just like there is not one paper currency (or metal currency). Theres dollars, Euros, pesos.

The difference is: those currencies have geographic borders.

Cryptocurrencies have use borders. ZCash might be used by people requiring higher anonymity. Filecoin might be used by people requiring decentralized storage. Dash might be used be people requiring faster transactions.

The borders are created when more problems are solved. Which is a true innovation for currency.

As opposed to borders (and supply) being created by geographic boundaries, central banks with secret control, or a gold mine down the block.

With Bitcoin, a list of transactions is sent out to the network in the form of a block. Miners, who are slowly paid in more bitcoin up to a maximum of 21,000,000 validate a transaction.

If a transaction doesnt make it into a block (on Bitcoin) it waits a certain period of time to get into the next block.

This means it might take more time (a problem).

Another problem is that everyone can see the transaction on what is called the blockchain. They cant see who it was but they can see the size and other details. (a problem).

Sometimes software can provide a solution (a coffee shop can say, Ill verify the transaction anyway and trust that in ten minutes Ill know for sure and theres not a lot of risk in this).

But a software layer involves humans and human error and human evil. Hence there are scammers and Ponzi scheme and theft (just like with paper currencies).

The good news is these are problems that can be eliminated.

Just like Internet software since 1991 solved (although always improving) the problems of speed, security, transactions, privacy, more functionality, etc think of cryptocurrencies as the Internet of Money.

These problems are being solved.

Either with new currencies (examples: Ether, Dash, filecoin, etc) some of which may be scam currencies, others may be legit. Time and research will tell (just like with the Internet in 1995)OR with forks in currencies, like what is happening today with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

SO WHAT IS BITCOIN CASH AND WHAT SHOULD I DO?

Bitcoin Cash tries to solve the problem of how can I buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin without using the software layer of Bitcoin.

Remember, if a transaction doesnt make it onto a block that is then sent out into the network to be validated, it has to wait.

Bitcoin Cash is simply the same as Bitcoin, except it increases the size of a block from 1MB to 8MB. Hence, faster transactions.

The reason that many exchanges are nervous about this hardfork is:

A) its never happened before. So there could be the possibility that smart developers can find a flaw in the process and steal money.

B) A fork is similar to a human election. We had a choice between Clinton and Trump and forked to Trump (not an exact analogy but rough).

Bitcoinis designed to limit human involvement as much as possible because all humans have different agendas.

For instance, perhaps China is greatly in favor ofBitcoinCash because they currently have a huge edge on mining and they will be able to amass a large amount ofBitcoinCash before others can.

So the fallout ofBitcoinCash, while probably correct philosophically and from a software point of view, is still unclear from a human point of view.

Same for the development of any new cryptocurrency (although all new currencies need scrutiny on the software side as well). But thisforkis abitmore intense becauseBitcoinis so big and its the first time this has happened.

This leads immediately to some logical conclusions:

What to do right now aboutBitcoinCash and August 1:

A) remove yourbitcoinwallet from exchanges and store it in cold storage. If you google cold storage you can see step by step how to do that.

B) If Bitcoin crashes 20% over the next few days because of this fork, Id be a buyer. The philosophy of Bitcoin remains the same, its still the biggest, and volatility only creates opportunity.

C) If Bitcoin Cash goes up too much, Id sell or sell short, only because we dont really know how people should value it.

Cryptocurrencies are going to be volatile for awhile. So in addition to the basic opportunity (Cryptocurrencies taking over all currencies) there is many additional trading opportunities due to the volatility.

First, back to the basics:

Why does volatility create opportunity?

Because its rare that intrinsic value changes very quickly from day to day.

Example: We know everything there is to know about McDonalds and 1000s of analysts research the company.

The intrinsic value of McDonalds will almost certainly never go down 20% in a day. But if the stock went down 20% in a day (example: a 9/11 event occurs causing a mass fear selloff across all stocks), then MCD becomes a value buy because the volatility exceeded the normal change in value.

If you can identify the Cryptocurrencies that are legitimate and not scams, then you can make a lot of money playing in volatile situations in Cryptocurrencies.

A) Cryptocurrency philosophy is valid and not going anywhere and is a natural evolution in:

a. the history of money from bartering to coins to paper money to data money

b. the history of every industry from theism to humanism to data-ism.

B) Volatility is huge as people determine what coins are real and what arent.

I wrote these basics around the circumstances of the event happening today: The bitcoin fork.

But I also want to begin helping the many people who are being scammed by all sorts of schemes and layers of schemes that are trying to dupe people into buying or trading cryptocurrencies that can be potentially worse than giant Madoff schemes.

Read the original:

The ABC'S of Bitcoin and Everything You Need To Know About Forks - HuffPost

by Marc Schaus

For anyone currently following the secular movements happening all over North America and the world at large we have some important new developments to talk about. There have now been many (read: many) secular milestones of 2017 thus far, all over the world, yet theres actually a chance that several of them could be news to you. And if youre surfing this side of Patheos, probably good news.

Depending on where you happen to get your daily dose of media, the world can seem to be drifting toward or away from secular values. One source can provide one running narrative for the changes we see, while multiple sources can offer us a bigger picture. At the far end of that spectrum would be the totality of news available to us and the biggest possible picture. Sounds good, right? The big, big picture? The trouble in getting that view is that with every passing week (every day, in fact), we have thousands of headlines from around the world and hundreds of research papers being published in academia from which to draw fresh information.

If you were to begin spending the time sifting through these various sources, you may be surprised at how much our incoming data can be directly relevant to the waxing or waning of secular values worldwide. Or, also related to secularism, which international social groups are potentially drifting from (or toward) traditional supernatural beliefs in general. Over time, the more international headlines and research one were to collect and analyze, the more a developing depiction of something roughly resembling the state of secularism would eventually emerge.

Admittedly, attempting to stay on top of developing stories worldwide regarding secularism and spiritual nonbelief can be a tough challenge. I mean, there are a lot of things happening out there every day, every hour, all across the world. From the rigorously fact-checked papers of scholarly work to the potentially sensationalist headlines of media outlets with an agenda to live up to to the scattered Tweets of experts and amateurs alike traveling as fast as wireless signals can carry them. Even full-time authors need to drop in from time to time simply with collections of stats to discuss between larger commercial books. Indeed, secular author Phil Zuckermans piece in The Huffington Post last year on the growth of atheism and nonreligion around the world was precisely that.[1]

In beginning to analyze these world headlines, the first thing one will typically notice is that we need to separate the dictionary definition of total secularism into the various transitory stages in which we find it surfacing (or diminishing) around the world. Some countries strongly separate church and state, while others take mere baby steps toward or away from this arrangement. As well, and also within all of those places; the degree to which individual states potentially mix in the related concept of spiritual nonbelief. Then, adding to that mix, the particular context for the significance each piece of news may carry for the social group in question.

How does this all look, then? Well, for one, we can always look at the tried-and-true church attendance numbers of various faiths, for all of their various sects, throughout the various parts of the world in which they still happen to exist (wherever such numbers are reliably recorded, that is). Significant drops in attendance can certainly fuel a specific narrative regarding each church and church services in general. In countries like the United States, we can also look at the survey rates of claimed irreligiosity or the polled attitudes of what those who still believe actually believe. With that data, we could then chart something of a rough spiritual cartography for differences between the content-changes of beliefs for actual believers both now and in yesteryears. Is God still considered male? Is Genesis still literal? Is Hell still a physical place? And so on. These changes matter for our developing narrative.

Right now, barely passing the halfway point of 2017, we are certainly due for another care package of stats regarding secularism and nonreligion. National polling organizations in the US like Gallup and the Pew Research Center have already revealed striking numbers this year in favor of increasing secularism (and for the slow erosion of traditional supernaturalism in general). For example, were one to survey only the most recent Gallup polls on religion just in 2017 alone, one would find that support for Biblical Creationism is reportedly now at an all-time low,[2] that support for a literal translation of the Bible as the Word of God is at an all-time low[3] and that while roughly half the American population still believes that religion can answer most of lifes problems,[4] this percentage has steadily declined from previous decades. Elsewhere, one would find that another recent national survey of college students found them less religiously-affiliated than ever.[5] Which makes sense, given that less than a year ago the Public Religion Research Institute had found that religious non-affiliation was actually the countrys largest religious group.[6] Or, even more incredibly and aside from mere non-affiliation, recent stats from secular research giant Will Gervais and co-author Maxine Najle estimated the outright atheist demographic at over 20% of the general US population.[7]

Keep in mind, however: a collection of polling stats from one country, from one set of organizations and in one calendar year should not be considered a statistical silver bullet. Refraining from undue sensationalism is rule number one in looking at such figures. Rather, we need to consider more stats, from more organizations in more and more countries. Each statistic merely reflects an individual data point to consider when making up the whole of our eventual narrative. So, yes, we ought to be careful about assuming too much influence in our developing state-of-the-union narrative from numbers in isolation.

As youll have guessed, secular trends are certainly not universal. After all, not every country is the United States. Weighing our data equally across the board (or at least attempting to) is crucial for getting an honest picture for our narrative. With that in mind, though, we also ought to be honest about the significance of the contrary data points that we may find. For example, finding data points of extremism in areas of the world already ripe with religiosity is easy. Examples of secularism and religious tolerance are far more significant in such areas. Likewise, in parts of the world historically dominated by religious indifference, cases of extreme values also ought to carry more significance. We can keep in mind that just as data points from one set of polls in one country in one year do not represent the entire secular story so too do contrary data points not constitute a full stop in the development of the secular narrative.

One such piece of contrary evidence may actually be ones own everyday experience, such as personally living in a region still fiercely religious. In that case, the data will not fit with your own empirical evidence of still being surrounded with highly supernatural beliefs, conservative believers, or both. You may happen to find yourself living in a pocket of the United States experiencing a kind of religious revival firsthand with a President determined to empower the countrys outspokenly religious attorney general to (and Ill quote him) issue guidance interpreting religious liberty protections in federal law.[8]

Evidence like this can be an example of limited lens, however. Incredibly religious, old-school conservative communities exist all over the US and, as I know, here in Canada. Tolerance for nonbelievers has not always been high in such places. And yet, Pew recently reported back in February that US feelings of warmness and acceptance toward atheists have risen on their thermometer ratings system from cool to neutral.[9] In Canada, acceptance has jumped even higher: the Angus Reid Institute recently reported that an estimated 80% of Canadians would now vote for an atheist Prime Minister.[10] Also in the West, outside the limited lens of terror attacks, Western Europe has also been known for secular trends. Yet another recent study from the UK indicated that the religiously-unaffiliated on their national survey analysis sometimes formed even the majority of individuals polled.[11]

Now, outside of the regions we typically associate with increased secularism, this transition may sound more removed from everyday life. For personal experience, you may also find yourself living in a part of the world still dominated by traditional religiosity, almost entirely devoid of nonbelievers. Possibly even a region routinely beset with violent acts of religious extremism. Direct experience with either can make the claim of secular trends or jumps in nonreligion sound like a tasteless joke.

For example, take the recent headline in Pakistan of student Mashal Khan who, despite being seemingly well-liked by his many classmates, was falsely accused of posting Facebook messages deemed disrespectful to Islam and was then surrounded by twenty other students who enacted the religious vigilantism of beating, stripping, taunting and eventually shooting him. Khans story was reported back in April of this year. Tragic headlines like these do little for a thesis of the world becoming more secular, or even more tolerant.

So we do have headlines of figures like Mashal Khan for a counter-narrative. But cases of more violent extremism are, as the name implies, extremes in the data. They also reflect a context relative to the environment in which they occurred. This is an environment where, even more recently in June, a Pakistani man was sentenced to death for a Facebook post deemed sufficiently blasphemous by police.[12] But historically, blasphemy laws and conservative courts have been typical here. We can contextualize that spin on the narrative by looking at (albeit smaller) historically rare instances of tolerance increasing. For example, an article published the very same month in Pakistan Today featured numerous rationales outlining how religious blasphemy laws are outdated, nonpeaceful and an affront to personal freedom.[13]

Lately, I see data points in religiously-inspired blasphemy laws being repealed in several other countries. Or, at the very least, laws bestowing specific benefits upon religious institutions being annulled or judicially defanged. Admittedly there are still plenty of developed countries which have blasphemy laws on the books, though most rarely, if ever, actively prosecute individuals who break those laws. For example, a country like Australia still has blasphemy laws in the criminal code which penalize any expression of self hostile to Christians but for the locals themselves, these archaic zombie laws are meaningless and are merely waiting for their inevitable expulsion from the countrys legal system.

Actively repealing blasphemy laws internationally constitutes baby steps away from theological jurisprudence for a greater proportion of world countries. Cases now abound in which blasphemy laws (and other religiously-inspired legal frameworks) are finally becoming contentious issues in Western/European countries where they still exist. For example, up until late 2016[14] there was far less protection in America for nontheists fighting state-level constitutional laws weighing in on religiosity as seven states do still bar nonbelievers from holding office (in some cases, from even being jurors). Here in Canada, legislation was recently introduced in June to eliminate blasphemy laws such as witchcraft and blasphemous libel.[15] Denmark also repealed its last 334-year-old blasphemy law earlier this year. Elsewhere, amendments have been proposed to end all of Irelands blasphemy laws after the tragicomedic arrest of British comedian Stephen Fry in which investigators were only able to find no joke one individual offended by Frys jokes in his blasphemy case.

Aside from the core legal code of any one country, we do have other, smaller secular legal developments which do not always splash in public debates. We have court battles raging throughout the US for the removal of religious symbolism from public spaces.[16] Or, here in Canada again, the newfound lack of scholastic enforcement for studying religious topics in Catholic schools in Ontario. Back in June of this year, students in Catholic schools were noted to soon become religious exempt in opting out of theological classes.[17] Points like these (there were many others to add) reflect yet more data points to make up the whole. None a silver-bullet but all contributing toward the big, big picture.

What do you think? Is a weekly headline-drop and routine care package of fresh stats regarding secularism and nonreligion around the world something youd like to see?

Marc Schaus is a Canadian author documenting the rise of secularism and nonreligion around the world. Before writing his first book, Marc conducted R&D research in neuroscience studying neural networks in the brain and has previously appeared in digital print discussing current events in the world of faith on The Huffington Post. His primary research focus now is how spiritual faith works in the human brain and why 21stcentury life is creating a cognitive advantage for secular, so-called superstitionless belief systems. Find Marcs new book on Amazon or via publisher Post Secular: Science, Humanism and the Future of Faith.

Featured image via Pixabay

NOTES

[1] Zuckerman, P. (2016). Religion Declining, Secularism Surging. The Huffington Post (Blog).

[2] (2017). In US, Belief in Creationist View of Humans at New Low. Gallup.

[3] (2017). Record Few Americans Believe Bible Is Literal Word of God. Gallup.

[4] (2017). Majority in US Still Say Religion Can Answer Most Problems. Gallup.

[5] See the latest CIRP Freshman Survey from the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) program here.

[6] Jones, R. Cox, D. Cooper, B. Lienesch, R. (2016). Exodus: Why Americans are Leaving Religionand Why Theyre Unlikely to Come Back. Public Religion Research Institute.

[7] Though they base this estimate on being roughly 99% certain the number is above 11%, with a slightly less accurate .8 probability of the number being above 20%. These numbers are still higher than previous estimates, however. Gervais, W.M. Najle, M.B. (2017). How Many Atheists Are There? Social Psychological and Personality Science.

[8] Referring to President Trumps recent executive order Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty.

[9] (2017). Americans Express Increasingly Warm Feelings Toward Religious Groups. Pew Research Center.

[10] (2017). Could our national leader be: ______?. Angus Reid Institute.

[11] Clements, B. Gries, P. (2017). Religious Nones in the United Kingdom: How Atheists and Agnostics Think about Religion and Politics. APSA: Cambridge University Press. DOI:10.1017/S175504831600078X

[12] (2017). Pakistan: Death penalty for blasphemy on Facebook. Al Jazeera.

[13]Sardar, K. (2017). The blasphemy law is self-defeating. Pakistan Today. http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2017/06/14/the-blasphemy-law-is-self-defeating/

[14]Referring to then-President Obamas December signing of an amendment to the Frank Wolf International Religious Freedom Act giving more protections to non-theistic beliefs.

[15]See Canadas own government website for a description of legislation concerning Cleaning up the Criminal Code: http://www.canada.ca/en/department-justice/news/2017/06/cleaning_up_the_criminalcodeclarifyingandstrengtheningsexualassa.html

[16]The latest of several, we have the June 2017 decision from a Florida judge to side with an atheist group to remove the Christian cross from a public park. For a copy of the story, see: Richardson, V. (2017). Atheist group scores win as judge reluctantly orders cross removed from Florida park. The Washington Times. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jun/19/atheist-group-scores-win-as-judge-reluctantly-orde/

[17](2017). Students can opt out of religious classes at Catholic school after complaint settled. The Star. https://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2017/06/13/students-can-opt-out-of-religious-classes-at-catholic-school-after-complaint-settled.html

Continued here:

The International Secular - Patheos (blog)

In an essay published in 2006 , the novelist Paul Beatty recalled the first book hed ever read by a black author. When the Los Angeles Unified School Boardout of the graciousness of its repressive little heartsent him a copy of Maya Angelous I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, he made it through a few maudlin pages before he grew suspicious, he wrote. I knew why they put a mirror in the parakeets cage: so he could wallow in his own misery. Observing that the defining characteristic of the African-American writer is sobriety, Beatty described his own path toward a black literary insobriety, one that would lead to the satirical style of his novels White Boy Shuffle and The Sellout . Along the way, he discovered a select canon of literary black satire, including Zora Neale Hurstons freewheeling story The Book of Harlem and Cecil Browns The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger.

Danzy Senna, Beattys friend and fellow novelist, makes an appearance in that essay, smiling wistfully as she shows him the cover of Fran Rosss hilarious 1974 novel, Oreo. As Senna later wrote in the foreword to the novels reissue , Oreo, about a biracial girl searching for her itinerant white father, manages to probe the idea of falling from racial grace while avoiding mulatto sentimentalism. Since her 1998 dbut novel, Caucasia, a stark story about two biracial sisters, Senna, like Ross before her, has developed her own kind of insobriety, one focussed on comically eviscerating the archetype of the tragic mulattothat nineteenth-century invention who experiences an emotional anguish rooted in her warring, mixed bloods. Both beautiful and wretched, the mulatto was intended to arouse sympathy in white readers, who had magnificent difficulty relating to black people in literature (to say nothing of life). Senna, the daughter of the white Boston poet Fanny Howe and the black editor Carl Senna, grew up a member of the nineties Fort Greene dreadlocked lite; her light-skinned black characters, who dodge the constraints of post-segregation America, provide an excuse for incisive social satire. Thrillingly, blackness is not hallowed in Sennas work, nor is it impervious to pathologies of ego. Senna particularly enjoys lampooning the search for racial authenticity. Her characters, and the clannish worlds they are often trying to escape, teeter on the brink of ruin and absurdity.

Sennas latest novel, the slick and highly enjoyable New People , makes keen, icy farce of the affectations of the Brooklyn black faux-bohemia in which Maria, a distracted graduate student, lives with her fianc among the new Niggerati. Maria and Khalil Mirskythe latters name a droll amalgamation of his black and white Jewish parentageare the same shade of beige. At their weddingto be held on Marthas Vineyard, that summer bastion of interracial prosperitythey will break a glass (Jewish) and jump the broom (black). Khalil thinks he knows why the New York Times gave them a wedding announcement: Were mulatto, he says to Maria. Everybody loves mulatto. The novels title shares its name with a documentary about this new, post-Loving v. Virginia generationborn in the late sixties to early seventies, the progeny of the Renaissance of Interracial Unionsand the mawkish hope they inspire in the bourgeois class. Were like a Woody Allen movie, with melanin, Khalil jokes to the white documentarian.

There is a hyper-specificity to Sennas satire that occasionally recalls Dave Chappelles barbed Racial Draft sketch: the couples favorite song is Al Greens Simply Beautiful; their favorite novel is Giovannis Room ; they sing the futurist liberation song If I Ruled the World, by Nas and featuring Lauryn Hill, at Fort Greene house parties. Khalil, who works in tech, has grown dreads past Basquiat but not quite Marley. Maria perms her hair to make it look kinkier. In fact, most of the characters in the novel are trying to make their blackness more palpable. Gloria, a militant academic who dies before completing a thesis on the triple consciousness of black women, was disappointed to discover, months after adopting Maria, that her baby was light-skinned enough to pass as Jewish, Italian, or Jewlatto. In an extended flashback, we learn that Maria and Khalil met at Stanford shortly before Khalil underwent a born-again negritude, publishing a column in the school newspaper in which he denounces the color-blind humanism that had left him unprepared for the racism of the world. Later, when the couple are engaged, Marias obsession with the poet, a dark-skinned black man (not one of the new people) whom she first sees at a reading, forms the central plot of the book: a quest for an unattainable, an uncomplicated blackness.

Maria, Sennas anti-heroine, is puzzlingseductively so. There are moments when she resembles the classic mulattress. She is alienated from her mother, whom she doesnt resemble. She is a hysteric, experiencing panics and peculiar lapses in memory. By the time we meet her, in her late twenties, Maria lives in brownstone Brooklynbut really she exists in her own private swoon, easily caught in peripheral drifts, always running late. In an early episode, on her way to a wedding gown fitting, a college acquaintance intercepts her and invites her inside what turns out to be a Church of Scientology. (Naturally, her personality test reveals her perilous potential.) The scene is dreamlikemordant at first, and then increasingly chilling; Maria, it is clear, is too easily swayed. She finally makes it to the fitting, late. Five gowns displayed on mannequin bodies on the opposite side of the room. They stand in a row, headless, waiting for her to fill them.

Recently, a new character has emerged in popular culture. Like Issa Rae of Insecure , or the eponymous heroine of The Incredible Jessica James, this modern black woman flaunts her neuroses with style. The carefree black girl is an archetype spawned of the Interneta woman who quirkily breaks expectations of how black women ought to behave in society. As Bim Adewunmi recently wrote of Jessica, Her race is not at the center of this movie. But the story is structured around this tall and interesting black woman, and thats something that is rare and wonderful. Listless and dreamy, these women are perfectly imperfectand their imperfections are carefully tailored to evoke in their black viewers a sense of recognition.

There were moments when, reading New People, I wondered if Senna had crafted Maria as a rebuttal to the lure of relatability in black art, which is itself a new form of sobriety. Just when we think we understand Mariaas a wayward, Brooklyn twenty-something in search of stability just like everyone elseshe shocks us. Far from being a victim, she is slightly feral; her crush on the poet, which begins as distraction from academia-induced agita, slowly becomes a hunt. When, after sitting next to him at a birthday dinner, she notices that he has left behind his Pittsburgh Steelers hat, it is almost as if she had willed it. She sniffs the hat for days, soon concocting a plan to return it to him.

At other moments, she seems sociopathic. So much of New People is about the erosion of feeling. We learn that, as a child at an ice rink, Maria dropped a skate down a flight of stairs, hitting another skater on the head. It was an accident, but Marias disinterest in admitting any fault makes her seem vicious. Later, horrifyingly, she shakes a baby to surprise her out of her fury, the way men in old movies slap the hysterical woman across the face. An early turning point occurs in the flashback, during Khalils activist awakening. Maria, irritated by her boyfriends incipient righteousness, plays a prank by leaving a voice mail for him in a lowered voice. Were gonna string you up by a dreadlock, man, and light you on fire, she says.

The campus plotline in Sennas novel reminded me of a moment in Justin Simiens Dear White People , a somewhat platitudinal film that also takes on self-serious young people who are newly, and superficially, occupying their racial identities. In Simiens film, the biracial heroine, Sam White, initiates a campus-wide panic after posing as a member of a campus organization and sending out an e-mail invitation to a blackface party. The incident in New People similarly escalates: Jesse Jackson comes to their college, telling the young brother to keep hope alive. But unlike Sam Whites prank, which is at least intended to spur her peers to actionand which she later comes to regretMarias appears meaningless. Khalil never finds out that it was Maria who left the message, and she never tells him. Instead, we learn, he makes slow, solemn revolutionary love to her. For Senna, identity, far from being a point of solidarity, is a beckoning void, and adroit comedy quickly liquefies into absurd horror.

See the rest here:

Danzy Senna's New Black Woman - The New Yorker

Al Gores An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power just appeared in theatres. Given the prominence of the first film, whose title the sequel evokes, and the subsequent advance of the strength of the environmental movement throughout the globe, it is sure to garner huge attention.

That isnt to say it will change any minds. Whether one ultimately decries it as a reheated version of the fare he first served up or deems it a worthy renewable probably depends less on the films merits than on whether one shares the authors fundamental presuppositions.

I have yet to see the film. But I do admire its brilliant marketing. From the image of an hourglass pouring a technicolour globe into a greyscale urban hell to its use of the Quaker slogan (adopted by the political left as its underdog motto) in the subtitle, no viewer can remain unmoved.

With the latter in mind, it is impossible not to see the sequel as agitprop against a Trump Presidency, with Gore, the Democrat politician and current board member of both Apple and Google representing the globalist elite against whom Trump ran his surprisingly successful campaign.

While it cannot be ignored as agitprop, that is of less of interest to me here than its prophetic call to action to rectify a terrible injustice.

How are we to understand that call?

What standard of justice?

Alex Epstein, who has authored a book making a moral argument for the use of fossil fuels, writes in a recent assessment of Gores sequel: As the most influential figure in the international climate conversation, Gore has a responsibility to give us the whole picture of fossil fuels impacts both their benefits and the risks they pose to humans flourishing. Unfortunately, Gore has given us a deeply biased picture that completely ignores fossil fuels indispensable benefits and wildly exaggerates their impact on climate.

Advances in technology are making fossil fuels cleaner, safer, and more efficient than ever. To reduce their growth let alone to radically restrict their use which is what Gore advocates means forcing energy poverty on billions of people.

Epsteinslittle article summarizes the little-heard moral objections to the environmentalists war on fossil fuels.

What is interesting to note though is that at the forefront of his moral concerns is, like Gore, the question of justice.

Epsteins moral framework, however, is that of a humanist. He determines right and wrong in accordance with the demonstrable benefit fossil fuels have made to ameliorate the human condition, and the demonstrable harm that energy poverty will cause to it. [I leave aside the question of whether the case he makes is sound or not, it is more the perspective Epstein takes that is of interest]

Accordingly, Epstein argues that the environmentalists like Gore ought to have to justify the human misery that must ensue if fossil fuels are abandoned on the scale they demand, and not just ignore it as an inconvenient truth.

What is equally apparent, however, is that he is speaking at cross purposes with Gore. And the reason for that is that Gore speaks on behalf of doing justice for a different constituency: not people, but the earth.

Environmentalism and posthumanism

While influential figures such as Al Gore, David Suzuki, et al. do talk about the effect of climate change on humanity, careful scrutiny reveals that it isnt their primary concern. The effect of climate change on people is more of a rhetorical flourish made to motivate their audience at the injustice done against them.

The reality, however, is that Gore and many in the environmental movement have a spiritual objection to Epsteins humanistic viewpoint. They deny that human interests ought to be the primary consideration in the debate. The survival of the planet is the primary issue.

The catastrophic language and images that the environmental movement deploys is not so much rhetorical as it is an expression of their core religious convictions. They have a different assessment of the value of human beings and where they stand in relation to the created order than Epstein.

They revere life, but only if it is understood impersonally, on the level of the lowest common denominator that a microbe shares with a man.

The environmental movements lack of care and concern for the effect of its policies on people is rooted in its posthumanist convictions.

The ideological basis of the environmental movement, which reaches back to the Romantic eras panentheist view of nature, deserves far more scrutiny than it currently receives.

That is because its detrimental effect upon peoples lives is not accidental, but intentional.

Posthumanism is moreover false because while the environmentalist cause strongly appeals to our sense of injustice, it ignores the fact that aside from human beings, the natural order on whose behalf it speaks knows nothing of it.

Gores sense of injustice depends on an obvious anthropomorphism of nature.

To acknowledge it, and the absurdity of the sense of injustice he evokes, is truly to speak truth to power.

And that is because it happens to contradict the untruth that conveniently serves the globalist elite against the great masses of humanity whose personhood is irrelevant to them.

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The convenient untruth of Al Gore's posthumanism - Patheos (blog)

Scott Hartley is a venture capitalist and author of THE FUZZY AND THE TECHIE

Scott Hartley is a venture capitalist and author of THE FUZZY AND THE TECHIE, a Financial Times business book of the month, and finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey & Company's Bracken Bower Prize for an author under 35. He has served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the White House, a Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV), and a Venture Partner at Metamorphic Ventures. Prior to venture capital, Scott worked at Google, Facebook, and Harvards Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He has been a contributing author at MIT Press, and has written for publications such as the Financial Times,Forbes,and Foreign Policy, and been featured in Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal.He holds three degrees from Stanford and Columbia, has finished six marathon and Ironman 70.3 triathlons.

Hartley first heard the terms Fuzzy and Techie while studying political science at Stanford University. At Stanford, if you majored in the humanities or social sciences, you were a Fuzzy. If you majored in the computer sciences, you were a Techie. According to Hartley, this informal division has mistakenly created a business mindset and believes Techies are the real drivers of innovation. Hartley believes that the Fuzzies, not the Techies, are the key talent responsible for creating the most successful new business ideas. The Fuzzies will develop ethics in artificial intelligence, question bias in algorithms and data and will bring contextual understanding to code, said Hartley.

Here are some of the Fuzzies referenced in Hartleys book:

A global study found that adoption of artificial intelligence will create several new job categories requiring very important skills that may surprise most. These new jobs fall into three categories:

MIT Sloan Management Review

Here is a short video of Author Anne-Marie Slaughter, speaking to graduates and referencing Hartleys book, noting that even in our STEM-obsessed world, we need humanists at the center of technology and industry.

To learn more about the power of Liberal Arts in shaping the future of work and the digital economy, Ray Wang and I invited Scott Hartley to our weekly show DisrupTV, where we feature the best and brightest business leaders, bestselling authors, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to discuss emerging technologies, business and leadership trends that will most impact our society.

Here are some of the key takeaways from our conversation with Hartley:

Democratization of technology is an advantage for creatives - As a venture capitalists, meeting with entrepreneurs and startup founders, Hartley began to notice that team building and cultivating a culture of innovation requires storytelling, creativity, empathy and Liberal Arts oriented skills and background. Hartley reminds us that today, tools have been democratized, so what you need most now is to be a full-stack integrator. The ability to code is less of prerequisite.

Education is not a plane ticket. Education is not about going from point-A to point-B. Education is more like a passport, where you are trying to get stamps from all different places. If you are really passionate about tech courses, you should also expand your purview to include non-technical curriculum. Get out of your comfort zone, collect the stamps, and build a well-rounded point of view. Hartley references philosophical questions that drove early design decisions at some of the fastest and most successful companies.

Software is feeding the world - Hartley quoted Kara Swisher where she said: San Francisco entrepreneurs is assisted living for the millennials, referencing the startup marketplace that is replicating services Moms use to deliver like laundry delivery, dog walkers, and food delivery. The changing consumer behavior and expectations dictate a greater need for the combination of Fuzzies and Techies skill-sets to build better products and services.

Robust AI algorithms are a function of diversity of input - Hartley remind us that product teams often learn from edge user cases which is often overlooked without a diverse set of inputs. Often the most important product and service design decisions are based on diverse set of human inputs, minimizing the biases that can be easy introduced in data sets and algorithms.

I highly encourage you to read THE FUZZY AND THE TECHIE and to watch our full conversation with Scott Hartley. In the video, Hartley provided numerous company examples that owe their success to Fuzzy leaders. I also recommend that you follow Hartley on Twitter at @ScotteHartley for his excellent thought leadership and shared wisdom.

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The 'greatest film-maker who ever lived' BBC News In the reflections of the anguished knight, it is possible to discern the arguments of Sartre in his 1946 essay Existentialism is a Humanism. Post-war and Cold War anxieties suffuse the films: as a character in Hour of the Wolf asks, The glass is ...

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The 'greatest film-maker who ever lived' - BBC News

Lucknow: BJP chief Amit Shah targeted the Congress over dynasty politics on Sunday and said that the lack of internal democracy in a political party results in it being dominated by caste or family.

Addressing a meeting of intellectuals in Lucknow, Shah drew parallel between the BJP and the Congress over who will be the next chief of the two parties. Shah asked the audience that who will succeed Sonia Gandhi in the Congress, to which the people responded saying Rahul Gandhi. He then posed the same question about the BJP.

"Can anyone tell me who will be the next president of BJP?, No one knows. A person with nirmal charitra (pious character) will head the BJP. The president of BJP is not elected on the basis of dynasty, caste or religion, but on the basis of merit," Shah said.

File image of BJP chief Amit Shah. PTI

"Internal democracy provides an opportunity for talent to develop naturally. In the absence of internal democracy in any political party, it ends up being run by gharanas (families). Among the 1,650 political parties in India, very few have internal democracy, and BJP is one of them," he said.

He said in the absence of internal democracy, a party cannot serve the purpose of democracy and incompetent heirs are chosen to head them.

"...Then these political parties become family-based or caste-based. Talent is not given any importance there, and talented people are sidelined. Parties like the SP and the BSP decide their waaris (heir). Sometimes there is a mistake in deciding the heir as well," the BJP chief said, apparently hinting at the falling out of SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav and his son and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav.

Shah said principles and development should also be two vital characteristics of a political party. "In absence of principles in a political party, casteism and family politics take over," Shah said.

He said the BJP is a party which follows "cultural nationalism", both in letter and spirit, and also believes in Antyodaya a model which touches all sections of the society, and aims to disseminating the benefits of development to the last strata of the society.

"Since 1950 to 2017, in the journey from Jan Sangh to the BJP, the basic principle has been Antyodaya, integral humanism and cultural nationalism," Shah said.

Shah claimed states without a BJP government have been "taken over by scams, corruption and dynasty politics.

Talking about Uttar Pradesh, he said the BJP will script history in terms of development.

"Owing to financial indiscipline, a term Bimaru (laggard) states was coined in the 1980s for Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan have come out of the Bimaru bracket. Bihar had shed the tag, when we were in government. There were some roadblocks, but day before yesterday things have moved in the right direction.

"We want to promise that UP will be out of the Bimaru bracket in the next five years. I assure you that under the leadership of Yogi Adityanath, we will script a new story of development of UP and make it the best state," Shah said.

He also claimed that the country's growth came down to 4.4 percent under the previous Congress-led UPA government. However, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it went up to seven percent.

Taking a jibe at former prime minister Manmohan Singh, the BJP chief said his government suffered from "policy paralysis".

"Every minister assumed himself to be the prime minister and no one considered him as the prime minister. Today under Narendra Modi, the BJP has completed three years in government, but even the rivals could not level allegations of corruption against us," Shah said.

"Wherever the BJP forms the government, it works for the welfare of the people, is transparent and decisive," he said. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and his deputy Keshav Prasad Maurya also addressed the meeting.

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Amit Shah says no internal democracy in Congress, claims BJP chiefs are picked on merit - Firstpost

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumars decision to switch from the Grand Alliance to the NDAhas come to signify to many the primacy of anti-corruption over secularism in Indian polity. It has inspired them to conclude that in the India of 2017, secularism is seen to have lesser importance, even to the point of becoming irrelevant, than what it was, say, even three decades ago. This stream of thought is evident in the responses of readers to my article.

Against the backdrop of Bihar, it is pertinent to ask:

What kind of political consciousness demands we choose between clean governance and secularism or, for that matter, between communalism and corruption? Is this a justifiable choice? If yes, who are the people who assign infinitely greater importance to one over the other, and why?

The Indian version of secularism, unlike the European one, demands the Indian state must pay equal respect to all religions. It has triggered competition among groups to pressure the Indian state to accord greater respect to their religion.

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar (right) with BJP leader Sushil Modi. PTI

However, this competition has certainly degenerated over the last three years, evident in a series of mob lynchings over the cow and consumption of beef. People sporting markers of religious identity are targeted. Inter-faith courtship is looked askance at, even inviting intimidation. In fact, the issue is now more about humanism than secularism.

Otherwise too, the pathology of communalism is reflected in the spree of rewriting textbooks, often taken by earlier regimes too, to promote their own ideologies. Nevertheless, it does not behove India to discard the principles of rationality and evidence in the endeavour of tailoring the production of knowledge.

Our credulity is indeed tested when it is claimed that Maharana Pratapvanquished Akbar in the battle of Haldighati. It is certainly a one-dimensional approach to history that ignores Aurangzeb supporting temples through land grants even as he destroyed some. It is undeniably ahistorical to claim that the discriminatory caste system emerged under Muslim rule, as so many Sangh ideologues insist.

Corruption in India has as long a history as the sharp contestation over secularism. Corruption mars governance, reduces state resources to waste, harasses people, thwarts competition for jobs, and impedes delivery of goods and services to the people. It skews, even subverts, anti-poverty programmes.

The menace of corruption makes us Indians praise any politician perceived to be clean or who takes a high moral ground on the issue of corruption, which has also become the symbol of degeneration of Indian polity.

But India can be cleansed through systemic changes, not through the intervention of an occasional politician who is billed as a paragon of moral rectitude.

This is because democracy in India has become a prohibitively expensive business. The sheer magnitude of finance required to fight, let alone win elections in India, has the political class taking recourse to black money. You have to be politically nave or duplicitous to believe that the treasure-chest of any of the political parties is completely legit. This includes the national parties the BJP and the Congress and all state-based outfits, including the JD(U).

Given the erosion of our public life because of communalism and corruption, what makes people categorise one of the two as a bigger evil? The answer will vary from individual to individual, depending on the threat corruption and communalism pose to each personally.

For sure, the majoritarian violence, as seen in the spate of mob lynching, worries innumerable Hindus. But it is not hard to imagine why it should pose a greater existential threat to the religious minorities, particularly Muslims.

In India, there is no escaping your name. You may shave off your beard or stop wearing the skull cap or the scarf over your head, but a Muslim name is a giveaway to the persons religious identity.

No wonder, the mushrooming of vigilante groups has fanned the anxieties and fears of the religious minorities.

By contrast, the majoritarian violence has not yet grown to render Hindus vulnerable. Their names and religious markers are their protection, although a few Hindus holding an opinion or acting in contradiction to Hindutva have been lampooned, trolled and attacked. For a good many Hindus, therefore, corruption poses a greater problem than communalism, in the firing line of which they are largely not present.

No doubt, corruption affects Muslims as well, at times in combination with communalism. But corruption does not pose as acute an existential problem as communalism does. This is why a substantial percentage of Muslims will rally behind those who appear tainted as long as they are thought to be their saviour.

Having to pay bribe under a corrupt regime is preferable to feeling anxious whether you might be beaten by fellow passengers in a train only because you happen to be Muslim.

Likewise, a large segment of Hindus will tend to support a leader who appears clean or has no documented evidence of corruption against him or her. For them, Hindu communalism has little salience, but Muslim communalism does. It is seen as a threat to Hindus, to the nation. Beginning the Gujarat Assembly elections of 2002, a concerted attempt has been made to turn democratic battles into one between Hindus and Muslims. Of this, the most recent example is the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections.

Muslims bear the brunt of Hindu communalism, but they also bear the burden of Muslim communalism, at times exaggerated, at times very true.

Obviously, both clean governance and secularism become slogans for consolidating vote-banks, as instruments of mobilisation. Many write-ups have pointed out that if Lalu is corrupt, then what about the Vyapam scam in Madhya Pradesh? This week, the 44th accused in the scam committed suicide. Others have died in what is called 'mysterious circumstances'. What about the land that BJP-ruled states gave to Baba Ramdev on hefty discounts that run into crores and crores of rupees, as Reuters pointed out recently?

These do not become headlines because the voters of the BJP, in an example of myopia, do not see it as threatening to their lives. They did not find it objectionable that Adityanath should become chief minister despite having made virulent, menacing remarks against Muslims, who, by contrast, take it as a dire symbol of the future awaiting them.

This is precisely why Nitish Kumar could so easily subvert the principle of secularism to his slogan of combating corruption. He knows that Hindus who support the BJP and even those who support the RJD and the Congress will not take to the streets against him for betraying the 2015 mandate. There will be protests here and there, but it will peter out. But the same Hindu supporters of the RJD and perhaps in the changed circumstances, those of the Congress too will vent fury should Kumar, say, seek to roll back reservations.

Sadly then, secularism and clean governance are political conveniences and tactics to win majorities it all depends on which of the two is more politically advantageous at a given point in time.

This is the calculation that Kumar, rather cynically, made before switching from the Grand Alliance to the BJP.

(Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist in Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, has as its backdrop the demolition of the Babri Masjid.)

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Nitish Kumar quits Mahagathbandhan: Sacrificing secularism for clean governance is just myopic - Firstpost

One problem with American society is that many of the successful, intelligent and otherwise kind people are far too busy pursuing success, so that they fail to put their skills in service to political and social transformation. As I see it, this is one of the major blind spots of common sense attitudes of libertarian, liberal and conservative citizens alike. Too many of us remain practically indifferent to the astounding magnitude of political corruption, violence and economic upheaval in America and the world over. Here the actual drivers and machines of political speeches, free markets and promises of progress are dominated by globalizing market trajectories, corporate party interests, and relentless profiteering couched in the language of liberty and the good life.

Meanwhile at home, the life of success, family and profit seems harmless and even well deserved (hard work!). But outside the bubble of nostalgic patriotism and the complex lie of greatness that masks a tremendous disparity between 1st and 3rd world countries and a "secular aristocracy" in America that hordes over 90% of its wealth and resources, a sober look at the international landscape reveals crises that would make even the most mediocre moralist commit to politics and real change.

And yet most of us remain complacent and perpetually default to a benefit-of-the-doubt attitude, which is ultimately nothing more than a form of wishful, even magical thinking - opium of the masses as Marx once put it. What to do? How to come together and act without merely waiting for mass-scale catastrophes and the exposure of unbearable crimes to prompt urgent civic responses and leadership from the ground up?

Brilliant political theorist and ecologist William Connolly illuminates this problem from a global perspective in his new book: Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. Here's a passage that captures some of his aims and orientation. Notice his use of the phrase 'passive nihilism' which speaks to the concerns just articulated:

"The challenges of today solicit both an embrace of this unruly world and pursuit of new political assemblages to counter its dangers. Today the urgency of time calls for a new pluralist assemblage organized by multiple minorities drawn from different regions, classes, creeds, age cohorts, sexualities, and states. This is so in part because the effects of the Anthropocene often hit the racialized urban poor, indigenous peoples, and low-lying areas hard, while its historical sources emanate from privileged places that must be challenged from inside and outside simultaneously. Militant citizen alliances across regions are needed to challenge the priorities of investment capital, state hegemony, local cronyisms, international organizations, and frontier mentalities. Some adventurers I will consult already record and pursue such countermovements.

What follows is a series of attempts to face the planetary. Not only to face down denialism about climate change but also to define and counter the passive nihilism that readily falls into place aft er people reject denialism. By passive nihilism I mean, roughly, formal acceptance of the fact of rapid climate change accompanied by a residual, nagging sense that the world ought not to be organized so that capitalism is a destructive geologic force. The ought not to be represents the lingering effects of theological and secular doctrines against the idea of culture shaping nature in such a massive way. These doctrines may have been expunged on the refi ned registers of thought, but their remainders persist in ways that make a difference. Passive nihilism folds into other encumbrances already in place when people are laden with pressures to make ends meet, pay a mortgage, send kids to school, pay off debts, struggle with racism and gender in equality, and take care of elderly relatives. Or, similarly, they may eke out a living in the forest and try to figure how to respond when a logging company rumbles into it. Or, on another register, they may teach students who both want to believe in the future they are preparing to enter and worry whether that lure has itself become a fantasy. The sources of passive nihilism are multiple. Under its sway, as we shall see, many refute climate denialism but slide away from stronger action. That is the contemporary dilemma. Few of us surmount it completely. But perhaps it is both necessary and possible to negotiate its balances better" (2017, p. 9).

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Texas Tech University Health Science Center El Pasos Veronique Masterson brings you this edition of Tech Talk.

Today, Veronique revisits the always-emotional white coat ceremony for Paul L. Foster School of Medicine students, again held this year at the historic Plaza Theatre.

Students in thePaul L. Foster School of Medicine(PLFSOM)s class of 2021 received their first white coats during a special ceremony last Saturday.The momentous event marked the beginning of thejourney toward becoming a physician for each of the103 new first-year medical students.

The White Coat Ceremony is a traditional rite of passage for fledgling medical students and signifies their acceptance into the medical field. In addition to donning a white coat for the first time, the students recited an oath acknowledging their roles as future health care providers.

The ceremony celebrated not only the hard work and discipline it took to be admitted to medical school, but also underscored the importance of humanism in medicine.

During the 2016-17 admissions season,Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso(TTUHSC El Paso)s PLFSOM received nearly 4,000 applications. Of those, 535 candidates were interviewed for spots among its ninth entering class.

Twenty-five of the students who entered the class are originally from El Paso and most are Texas residents. The class of 2021 began its medical studies the first week of July.

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Marieke Prien is the President of the International Humanist and Ethical Youth Organisation (IHEYO), which is part of IHEU. In this educational series, we will be discussing international youth humanism, part 2.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When you step down from the role, what will be the main lessons to pass on to the next president in terms of expectations and managing an international presence, which is no small feat?

Marieke Prien:You need a good team and good plans.

Without a working team, you cannot really do anything.

Of course, there will be ups and downs, people who do more or better work and others who do less.

But those should be single cases. In my opinion, people who have not done well deserve another chance and should be provided support if they need it. This support could be help with certain tasks or something boosting their motivation. But if it becomes clear that they are causing more work than they get done, its better to ask them to leave the team.

If overally everybody does a great job, is motivated and willing to spend time and energy, and you can trust them, that is the basis you need.

A hierarchy is necessary for productivity and decision making, but in my opinion, this should not be reflected in how people treat each other. For example, everybody must have the opportunity to say their opinion and voice concerns or make suggestions, and we should meet each other as equals.

Regarding the plans, you must have an understanding of where you are and where you want to go.

You must know what is currently going on: What is done or needs to be done in the background to keep things working, to have a stable fundament? And which projects are we doing based on this fundament?

The same goes for future plans. What do we want to do and what is necessary to do this?

Also, the plans have to be consistent with what is realistic. In IHEYO, everybody is a volunteer. Nobody is paid for the work, everybody does this on top of their job or studies. This gives us certain limits. The limits wont stop us, but they affect us.

Jacobsen: What are some of the main ways youth humanists tend to become involved in activism, e.g. in combating religious overreach in culture or law, in coming together for LGBTQ+ rights, and in fighting for the fragile rights of the secular and irreligious?

Prien:These topics are so important for the youth because they affect their everyday life. When you start having more freedoms, you immediately see where this freedom is cut and who is behind that. Becoming adults, the young people get a better understanding and more awareness of what is going wrong.

To be involved in activism, you need connections to other activists (or those who want to become active). Sure, you could do something on your own, but most people gather in groups.

In the beginning, something needs to challenge the person and make them aware of the problem they then decide to fight against. For example, a young person may be made uncomfortable for their sexuality, or they realize a friend is forced to follow stricts religious rules. Then, they try to gather more information and talk to others about the issue. This can be face to face or online. When I was in the USA for a semester abroad, I loved how many clubs the university had that got people involved. This is such a great way to help people become active, and it has a good scope.

The internet is also a huge help. It makes it super easy to find like-minded persons and interact with them, and to potentially plan activities.

We probably all know people who like to post articles and rant online about issues but without going out and becoming actually active. And oftentimes this is frowned upon. While I also believe that working in an organization or the like is way more effective and cannot be replaced, the online activities also do help the cause in that they can trigger fruitful discussions and get people interested in topics.

Jacobsen: On the note of activism, we both know of the attacks on womens rights ongoing since, probably, their inception, but the recent attack appears to be focused on reproductive health rights. What are concerns for you regarding womens rights, and especially reproductive health rights from a youth humanist angle?

Prien:One main part of humanism is that it wants people to live freely and make their own decisions, forming their lives and going their ways. Cutting reproductive health rights means cutting this freedom. It takes away womens authority over their bodies and their life plans. The second point also affects men, though overally the effect is much stronger on women.

So this is one point where cutting reproductive health rights disagrees with humanism.

Another huge problem I see is that many people are unable or unwilling to make a distinction between their personal opinions and emotions (often influenced by their religion), and what may be right for others. For example, if you would personally feel bad about getting an abortion, you should still see the other side and accept that other people think an abortion is the right decision, and let them make their choice.

We must make a difference between opinion and fact, and many lobby groups mix these things up, actively misinforming or making false assumptions and relations. For example, some anti-abortion groups try to make people feel bad by saying that contraceptives and masturbation are immoral and against their religion.

Or they say that in the period where abortion is legal in some states, the fetus already has a heartbeat. That is true, but it does not mean that it can feel pain (or anything at all, for that matter), because its brain has not developed for that yet. But the fact of the fetus having a heartbeat is used to evoke emotions in people and to lead them to draw the conclusion that something with a heartbeat surely also feels pain.

As a humanist, I want people to make a choice based on facts and universal ethics, not based on opinions, superstitional beliefs and false statements. And I want people to understand that their personal opinion is just an opinion that does not necessarily count for others.

Cutting the reproductive health rights also causes a lot of other problems. It can lead to huge physical, psychological and social problems. For example, if a woman needs an abortion but cannot legally get one where she lives, she may decide to go through a very unsafe illegal procedure, or spend a lot of money (that she doesnt necessarily have) to go to a place where abortion is legal.

That being said, of course an abortion could also cause emotional and mental damage. I am not trying to say that one should just get it carelessly. I am just trying to show that while it would be the wrong decision for some, it is the right one for others.

What really bugs me is the hypocrisy many anti-abortion groups or individuals show. They claim that they are pro-life, caring for everyones right to live. But they dont care about the mothers lives, they dont care about the circumstances for babies up for adoption, some even mistreat and judge single mothers working really hard to feed their children. Thats not charity.

Regarding womens rights in general, things have changed for the better, but the fight is not over. Sadly, many people only point to the successes, ignoring that there are still problems. This also goes for other issues like racism. If you are in the privileged group, it is easy to overlook discrimination. But just because you dont see it, it doesnt mean that discrimination does not exist.

I also believe that many people choose to disregard concerns or complaints expressed to them because, if they believed them, they would have to admit they do or have done something wrong.

I wish that people would make more of an effort and listen, open their eyes, have empathy and change their behavior if necessary.

Original publication in medium.com/humanist-voices.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

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Thinking for the Future, Youth Humanism and Passing the Torch - - The Good Men Project (blog)

Yasaman Alavi grew up in Iran, a country with a vibrant food culture. "Food is a big part of life in Iran," says Alavi, a psychotherapist who now lives in Washington, D.C. She says her mother and aunt were excellent cooks who often prepared big feasts for family gatherings.

But as a young woman in Iran, she didn't bother to learn their culinary tricks. "I didn't really like cooking that much," she says.

That changed once she moved to the United States in 2008. "I missed the Persian dishes," she says. "So that's what motivated me to cook more and more."

In this video, she shows us how she makes zereshk polow ba morgh the Farsi name for a rice dish with raisins and barberries a tart fruit like the cranberry that is eaten with a slow-cooked chicken dish on the side. The meal is often accompanied by a yogurt sauce with cucumbers called mast-o-khiar.

Jump to the recipe.

Alavi says cooking in her adopted country also helped her deal with homesickness. "I kind of coped through cooking," she says. The act of re-creating dishes from her childhood and youth helped Alavi feel more connected to her country and family. These days, she and her husband, also an Iranian-American, regularly cook Persian food.

Alavi's instinct to tackle homesickness through food is something immigrants from many countries including myself can relate to. I moved to the United States in 2002 and only then started cooking the regional Indian cuisine from my home state, West Bengal. And while I love the range of cuisines I have access to in this country, the food I turn to when I'm homesick is a simple Bengali meal of rice and massoor daal red lentils cooked with fried onions and a five spice mix called paanch phoron.

Sometimes the relatives from back home ease the pain with food parcels, like Greek families used to send to their loved ones abroad, says David Sutton, an anthropologist at Southern Illinois University. Sutton has studied the role of food in the Greek diaspora and found that Greek immigrants often describe how food from home makes them feel "whole."

"[T]here is an imagined community implied in the act of eating food "from home" while in exile," Sutton writes in a paper published in the journal, Anthropology and Humanism.

Some enterprising immigrants figure out a way to earn a living by serving the familiar tastes of home and something more. Mina Bestman moved to Georgia from Liberia about 20 years ago and now runs Mina's Cuisine, a West African restaurant that caters to homesick Liberians. "I opened the restaurant so we can gather and talk about back home," Bestman told Goats and Soda in a story we published a few years ago.

Food is a powerful trigger for nostalgia, says Chelsea Reid, a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University. Even the smell of food can evoke nostalgia and not just for immigrants. In a study published in 2014, in the journal Memory, Reid and her colleagues tested whether different scents including pumpkin spice, apple pie, eggnog, perfume and cappuccino could evoke nostalgia.

"The scent that evoked the most nostalgia was pumpkin pie," she says. "That's a scent that makes us think of celebrations, of Thanksgiving, gathering with family and friends."

She also found that the nostalgic feelings triggered by smells make people feel more optimistic and give them a sense of social connection.

That could explain why the smell of rice is so important to Alavi. "That's a big part of Iranian life the house [always] smells like rice is cooking," she says. "I think I started cooking to make the new home smell like the old home that I had back in Iran."

Rice with barberries

2 cups white rice 1/2 cup raisins 2/3 cup dried barberries (sold online and at Persian grocery stores) 4 cups water 1 tablespoon saffron water 4 tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon butter Pinch salt 1 teaspoon saffron threads

(Note: You can buy dry saffron threads at any good spice store or online. Saffron threads should be dry. If they look moist, put them in the microwave for 5 seconds to dry them before cooking.)

Put the rice in a pot and add four cups of water and two tablespoon of oil with a pinch of salt.

Bring to a boil over a high flame.

Once the water is boiling bring the flame to medium-low. Then cover the pot and cook for about 30 minutes or until the water has evaporated.

Once there's no more water in the pot, and the rice looks close to being fully cooked, add 2 tablespoons of oil to the rice drizzle 1 tablespoon around the outer end of the rice, and drizzle 1 tablespoon in a small circle over the middle of the rice. The oil will help make the bottom of the rice brown and crispy, while preventing it from sticking to the pan. This crispy crust is called tahdig in Farsi it means "bottom of the pan." Most Iranian rice dishes are cooked this way to create a crunchy tahdig.

Grind the saffron threads by hand in the mortar and pestle into a fine powder (or use 1/2 teaspoon of saffron powder). Now add 2 tablespoons of boiling water to the saffron powder to make saffron water.

Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a small pan, add the berries and raisins as well as 1 tablespoon of the saffron water. Save the remaining water for the chicken. Stir frequently for a few seconds, until the water evaporates.

Now take the rice pot off the stove and flip the pot over a plate. The rice should come out of the pot looking like a cake, with the crispy and golden brown tahdig on top.

Put half of the mixture of berries and raisins over the rice, and put the rest in a small bowl next to the rice for extra garnishing.

Chicken

2 tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon butter 3 large yellow onions, chopped 2 pounds of chicken legs and thighs 4 cardamom pods 1/2 tablespoon paprika 1 tablespoon black peppercorns 1 tablespoon white pepper 3 cloves 1 1/2 tablespoons coriander seeds 1/2 teaspoon cumin seed

Heat the pan and pour 2 tablespoons of olive oil into it. Add the chopped onions. Cook on high flame, stirring occasionally.

While onion cooks, grind the spices (cardamom seeds, paprika, black and white pepper, cloves, coriander and cumin) by hand in a mortar and pestle. If you don't own a mortar and pestle, use a small food processor instead.

Now coat the chicken pieces on both sides with the ground spice mix and add the chicken to the pot with the onion. Cover the pot and let the chicken cook over medium heat for 45 minutes to one hour.

Add 1 tablespoon of the remaining saffron water to the chicken and stir just before taking it off the stove.

Yogurt sauce

1 24-ounce container yogurt. 4 English cucumbers, peeled and cubed 1 teaspoon dried mint tablespoon dried rose petals (available at specialty grocery stores or online) Salt and pepper to taste

Whisk the yogurt with salt, pepper, dried mint and dried rose petals till smooth. Add cucumbers and set aside till rice and chicken are ready.

To serve zereshk polow ba morgh, cut a wedge of the rice. Place it on a plate, garnish with some of the remaining berries, add a serving of chicken to the side and a dollop of yogurt sauce. Enjoy!

Tell us a memory you have about a dish you love. Post a video or photo on Instagram or Twitter with the hashtag #NPRHotPot, and we'll gather some of our favorites and post them on NPR.org. Get the details here.

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The Aroma Of Rice And Barberries Takes Her Back Home To Iran - WUWM

President Ram Nath Kovind's swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday had all the grandeur associated with a change of guard at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, guardian of the Constitution of the largest democracy on Earth. However, for keen students of politics, the most noteworthy aspect of the ceremony lay elsewhere. This was perhaps the first time in living memory that an incoming president chose to make his inaugural speech immediately after taking oath of office.

Therefore, his first address to the nation was from the Central Hall of Parliament, in the presence of the Union Council of Ministers,members of both Houses of Parliament, governors, chief ministers, judges, former presidents and other invited dignitaries. That initself was a novelty introduced by President Kovind.

And his inaugural speech was indeed well-crafted, striking all the right notes, mentioning plurality and togetherness of the nation, outlining his vision for India as a world leader in the 21st Century, and also reminiscinghis own journey from humble origins in a small Uttar Pradesh village to the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

However, there is another thing his speech would be remembered for the illustrious people he named, and more importantly perhaps, the peoplehe chose not to name.For, this indicates the political shift that Indian polity has taken in recent years. Takethese words: "I bow to the 125 crore citizens of this great nation and promise to stay true to the trust they have bestowed on me. I am conscious I am following in the footsteps of stalwarts such as Dr Rajendra Prasad, Dr S Radhakrishnan, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, and my immediate predecessor, Pranab Mukherjee, whom we address out of affection as 'Pranabda'."

President Ram Nath Kovind is greeted by political leaders after being sworn in as President of India. PTI

Former president Pratibha Patil, who was sitting in the front row, didn't find a mention. Neither did KR Narayanan, the first Dalit to be elected President of India (Kovind is the second Dalit to occupy the august office). Diplomat-turned-politician Narayanan had the distinction of being nominated to the top post by a Congress-backed minority government under IK Gujral, but he secured support from almost all quarters, winning 95 percent votes in the presidential election.

However, he didn't have sweet relations with the BJP government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee that succeeded Gujral at the Centre. In 1998, when BJP emerged single largest party in the Lok Sabha with 182 seats, Narayanan asked its leader Vajpayee to produce signed letters of support from his alliance partners to provethat the BJP could muster enough majority support in a floor test. BJP leaders went through some anxioustimes, with AIADMK chief J Jayalalithaa taking her own sweet time in sending a letter to Vajpayee.

In April 1999, when Jayalalithaa withdrew her support and sent a letter to this effect to the president, Narayanan asked Vajpayee to undergo a vote of confidence in Lok Sabha instead of letting the Opposition move a no-confidence motion against the Centre. That small technicality ultimately made all the difference, as Vajpayee's government fell short by one vote.

Further, when the Centre wanted to dismiss Bihar's Rabri Devi-led RJD government, Narayanan was again not convinced about this move.

Throughout these years, Kovind had been a BJP leader. He must have remembered those developments and Narayanan's role in them before deciding that the former president wasn't among the list of "stalwarts" of Indian politics.

Moments later, he also chose not to name the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, instead praisingSardar Vallabhbhai Patel and BR Ambedkar for the evolution of the Indian Republic.

"Our Independence was the result of efforts by thousands of patriotic freedom fighters led by Mahatma Gandhi. Later, Sardar Patel integrated our nation. Principal architect of our Constitution, Babasaheb Ambedkar, instilled in us the value of human dignity and of the republican ethic.These leaders did not believe that simple political freedom was enough. For them, it was crucial to also achieve economic and social freedom for millions of our people," he said.

Aconscious omission of Nehru's name and inclusion of Patel and Ambedkar as national icons is in sync with the thought process of the current BJP dispensation under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.

Kovind stressed on nation building and spoke of India's aspirations of being viewed as a world leader, again in sync with what the prime ministerconveys in his own public meetings. The new president also said, "Nations are not built bygovernments alone. The government can at best be a facilitator, and a trigger for society's innate entrepreneurial and creative instincts. Nation building requires national pride. India's voice counts in today's world. The entire planet is drawn to Indian culture and soft power. The global community looks to us for solutions to international problems whether terrorism, money laundering or climate change. In a globalised world, our responsibilities are also global."

The concluding paragraph of President Kovind's speech was perhaps the most significant, where he spoke of Mahatma Gandhi and Deen Dayal Upadhyay in the same vein. "We need to sculpt a robust, high-growth economy, an educated, ethical and shared community, and an egalitarian society, as envisioned by Mahatma Gandhi and Deen Dayal Upadhyayji. These are integral to our sense of humanism," he said.

As per parliamentary tradition, the Vice-President reads the first and last paragraphs of the Hindi or English translations of the President's speech. Today, Hamid Ansari read the English version of Ram Nath Kovind's concluding paragraph, the one which placed the 'Father of the Nation' and the foremost ideologue of the Sangh Parivar on the same footing.

As the official function came to a close in the Central Hall of Parliament, back-benchers from the BJP gave an interesting closing touch, chanting "Bharat Mata Ki Jai" and "Jai Shri Ram".

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Ram Nath Kovind shares Narendra Modi's vision as Nehru, Narayanan find no place in his inaugural speech - Firstpost

Barely hours after Ram Nath Kovind was sworn in as India's 14th President, Congress leader Anand Sharma made it clear in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday that the Opposition was upset at the omission of Jawaharlal Nehru's name from Kovind's speech.

"Every country and society respects nation builders, so has been the culture in India. Like (Mahatma) Gandhi is respected and has the highest stature in the nation. Along with him was Jawaharlal Nehru who even went to jail," Sharma said.

Leading the boisterous Opposition charge, Sharma also took exception to Kovind allegedly comparing Gandhi to Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay, Jan Sangh icon and the founder of Panchjanya.

"It is very sad and unfortunate that he did not take the name of Nehru who was a freedom fighter though he did mention his cabinet colleagues BR Ambedkar and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in his speech," leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad, said.

Union minister Arun Jaitley, not one to take an Opposition accusation lying down, remarked that the Zero Hour "can't run only for the benefit of the television channels". Jaitley demanded that Sharma's whole speech be expunged.

"Reference to a high constitutional authority is not allowed in the house. What is the purpose of dragging...we know the spirit of what you are saying," NDTV quoted Jaitley as saying.

Azad countered Jaitley: "We raise issues that affect people and not for television camera." Rajya Sabha had to be adjourned till 12 pm.

"We need to sculpt a robust, high growth economy, an educated, ethical and shared community, and an egalitarian society, as envisioned by Mahatma Gandhi and Deen Dayal Upadhyay ji. These are integral to our sense of humanism. This is the India of our dreams, an India that will provide equality of opportunities. This will be the India of the 21st century," Kovind had said during his first speech as President.

Kovind, India's second Dalit President, also made a case for diversity.

"The key to India's success is its diversity. Our diversity is the core that makes us so unique. In this land we find a mix of states and regions, religions, languages, cultures, lifestyles and much more. We are so different and yet so similar and united," he said.

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No Space For Nehru? Government And Opposition Leaders Spar In Parliament Over Kovind's Speech - Huffington Post India

Ram Nath Kovind was sworn in as the 14th President of India on Tuesday. He isthe second Dalit after KR Narayanan to occupy the august office.Kovind was administered the oath of office to "preserve, protect and defend the constitution and law" by Chief Justice of India JS Khehar in an impressive ceremony in the Central Hall of Parliament.

CJI JS Khehar swearing in Ram Nath Kovind as the President of India. PTI

After he took oath, Kovind was given a 21-gun salute to mark the assumption of office of the highest constitutional post in the country. Kovind was elected with 65 percent votes, defeating his chief rival for the post, Meira Kumar.

Here is thefull text of the speechKovind gave when he assumed the office of the President of India on 25 July, 2017:

Respected Shri Pranab Mukherjee ji,

Shri Hamid Ansari ji,

Shri Narendra Modi ji,

Shrimati Sumitra Mahajan ji,

Shri Justice J. S. Khehar ji,

Excellencies,

Honble Members of Parliament,

Ladies and Gentlemen, and

Fellow Citizens

I thank you for electing me to the responsibility of the President of India, and I enter this office with all humility. Coming here to Central Hall has brought back so many memories. I have been a Member of Parliament and here, in this very Central Hall, have had discussions with many of you. Often we agreed, sometimes we disagreed. But we learnt to respect each other. And that is the beauty of democracy.

I grew up in a mud house, in a small village. My journey has been a long one, and yet this journey is hardly mine alone. It is so telling of our nation and our society also. For all its problems, it follows that basic mantra given to us in the Preamble to the Constitution of ensuring Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity and I will always continue to follow this basic mantra.

I bow to the 125 crore citizens of this great nation and promise to stay true to the trust they have bestowed on me. I am conscious I am following in the footsteps of stalwarts such as Dr. Rajendra Prasad, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, and my immediate predecessor, Shri Pranab Mukherjee, whom we address out of affection as Pranab Da.

Our Independence was the result of efforts by thousands of patriotic freedom fighters led by Mahatma Gandhi. Later, Sardar Patel integrated our nation. Principal architect of our Constitution Babasaheb Bhim Rao Ambedkar instilled in us the value of human dignity and of the republican ethic.

These leaders did not believe that simply political freedom was enough. For them, it was crucial to also achieve economic and social freedom for millions of our people.

We would be completing 70 years of our Independence soon. We are also well into the second decade of the 21st century, a century that so many of us intuitively believe will be an Indian century, guided and shaped by India and its accomplishments. We need to build an India that is an economic leader as well as a moral exemplar. For us, those two touchstones can never be separate. They are and must forever be linked.

The key to Indias success is its diversity. Our diversity is the core that makes us so unique. In this land we find a mix of states and regions, religions, languages, cultures, lifestyles and much more. We are so different and yet so similar and united.

The India of the 21st century will be one that is in conformity with our ancient values as well as compliant with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. There is no dichotomy there, no question of choice. We must combine tradition and technology, the wisdom of an age-old Bharat and the science of a contemporary India.

As the gram panchayat must determine our consultative and community based problem solving, the Digital Republic must help us leapfrog developmental milestones. These are the twin pillars of our national endeavour.

Nations are not built by governments alone. The government can at best be a facilitator, and a trigger for societys innate entrepreneurial and creative instincts. Nation building requires national pride:

We take pride in the soil and water of India;

We take pride in the diversity, religious harmony and inclusive ethos of India;

We take pride in the culture, heritage and spirituality of India;

We take pride in our fellow citizens;

We take pride in our work; and

We take pride in the little things we do every day.

Each citizen of India is a nation builder. Each one of us is a custodian of Indias well-being and of the legacy that we will pass on to coming generations.

The armed forces that protect our borders and keep us safe are nation builders.

Those police and paramilitary forces that fight terrorism and crime are nation builders.

That farmer toiling in the blazing sun to feed fellow citizens is a nation builder. And we must never forget that so much of our farm labour comprises women.

That scientist concentrating tirelessly and 24 x 7 to send an Indian space mission to Mars, or invent a vaccine, is a nation builder.

That nurse or doctor helping the sick to recover and fighting disease in a remote village, is a nation builder.

That young person who founds a start-up and becomes a job creator is a nation builder. The start-up could be on a small farm, converting mangoes to pickles. Or in an artisans village, weaving carpets. Or at a laboratory lit up by giant screens.

That tribal and ordinary citizen striving to preserve our ecology, our forests, our wildlife, to push back climate change and to advance the cause of renewable energy, is a nation builder.

That committed and driven public servant who works beyond the call of duty, whether on a flooded road, directing traffic; or in a quiet room, poring over detailed files, is a nation builder.

That self-less teacher who equips young children and shapes their destinies, is a nation builder.

Those countless women who take care of families with so many other responsibilities, at home and work, and raise children to become ideal citizens, are nation builders.

People elect their representatives from the Gram Panchayat to Parliament. They vest their will and hopes in these representatives. In turn, the peoples representatives devote their lives to the service of nation.

But, our endeavours are not for ourselves alone. Down the ages, India has believed in the philosophy of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam ( ) the World is My Family. It is appropriate that the land of Lord Buddha should lead the world in its search for peace, tranquility and ecological balance.

Indias voice counts in todays world. The entire planet is drawn to Indian culture and soft power. The global community looks to us for solutions to international problems whether terrorism, money laundering or climate change. In a globalised world, our responsibilities are also global.

This links us to our global family, our friends and partners abroad, and our diaspora, that contributes in so many ways across the world. It brings us to the support of other nations, whether by extending the umbrella of the International Solar Alliance or being first responders following natural disasters.

We have achieved a lot as a nation, but the effort to do more, to do better and to do faster should be relentless. This is especially so as we approach the 75th Year of our independence in 2022. What must also bother us is our ability to enhance access and opportunity for the last person and the last girl-child from an under-privileged family if I may put it so, in the last house in the last village. This must include a quick and affordable justice delivery system in all judicial forums.

The citizens of this country are the real source of strength to me. I am confident that they will continue to give me the energy to serve the nation.

We need to sculpt a robust, high growth economy, an educated, ethical and shared community, and an egalitarian society, as envisioned by Mahatma Gandhi and Deen Dayal Upadhyay ji. These are integral to our sense of humanism. This is the India of our dreams, an India that will provide equality of opportunities. This will be the India of the 21st century.

Thank you very much!

Jai Hind

Vande Mataram

The entire text of the speech has been taken exactly as provided by the Press Information Bureauand has not been edited by Firstpost.

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Full text of Ram Nath Kovind's speech on his assumption of office as President of India - Firstpost

With a rather unimpressive budget of US$13 million, RoboCop premiered in the United States on July 17, 1987.

At the time, Walter Goodman, writing for the New York Times, called the film a police drama, and chose to focus on its violence and spectacularity though, fortunately, he also observed that humour glimmers amid the mayhem. This couldnt be truer: in the very first scene we are introduced to pitiable piece of mock news about the possibility of nuclear war in South Africa, immediately followed by a comedic report on a bumpy visit of the president of the United States to a space station.

Thus, RoboCop, with its hyperbolic, over-the-top style, can be viewed as a satire. As Sue Short, in Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity (2005), puts it, the film is filled with satirical stabs at American culture, using SF as a veil by which to ridicule cultural mores.

RoboCop blends science fiction and action, yet its also a buddy cop film, that genre so beloved of the 1980s. Think of 48 Hours (1982), Lethal Weapon (1987) or Tango and Cash (1989), where opposite pairs such as black/white, good/bad, funny/serious, compassionate/brutal or liberal/reactionary are essential to the plot. In RoboCop, these oppositions are shown through a police officer who in his double nature of man and automaton must face corrupt businessmen, psychopathic gangsters and a deadly, but clumsy, antagonist robot, and a motherly, rather sweet girl, The beauty in The Beauty and the Beast, according to Peter Weller, who plays Alex Murphy, our hero in a metallic shell.

Paul Verhoeven tried his luck in Hollywood with Flesh+Blood (1985) a medieval adventure charged with eroticism that came after The Fourth Man (drama/thriller, 1983), his last Dutch film. His tale of a robotic policeman is tinged with elements of auteur cinema, as there seems to be a personal trademark in the motifs hes exploited: urban and rather obscene violence, excess, decadence, and a tone of kitsch. The director commented that he wanted Murphy to have an extramarital affair with officer Lewis (Nancy Allen), but a puritan code mostly to be found in (American) science fiction stopped him from digressing in that direction.

In Flesh+Steel (2001), a documentary that shows the making of RoboCop, Verhoeven mentions intertextual connections which he drew upon as influences for the film, including Metropolis (1927) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). From Langs classic he took the futuristic, metropolitan architecture filled with skyscrapers in which the plot unfolds and from Wises admonitory film the design of the robot policeman, similar to the helmet and the visor that Gort, the alien guardian robot, wears. Additionally, in an interview published in Christine Corneas Science Fiction Cinema, Between Fantasy and Reality (2007), Verhoeven states that he had been studying comic books (he mentions specifically Judge Dredd) since his childhood, and that RoboCop owes much to that influence. He also connects his film with James Camerons Terminator, which he studied thoroughly before shooting RoboCop.

Like its successful predecessor Terminator (1984), RoboCop has elements of Christian theology. The director comments in the cited documentary that he wanted to show Satan killing Christ, although hes probably likening Jesus to the type of mythological hero that returns from the dead to avenge his killers, rather than to the Christ of orthodoxy that forgives his murderers. Murphy is trapped in a kind of hypostatic union between man and machine: his mortal frame, with memories and feelings that make him thus human, ends up being revived. In his role of incorruptible protector, but of mortal flesh, Alex Murphy dies to be resurrected, in this case by a greedy corporation and in the form of an android. Just as Jesus is part-God, part man, Murphy/Robocop is part-man, part-machine.

In RoboCop, theres still law and the officers in charge of enforcing it suffer as much as the rest of the working-class. Detroit, once the cradle of the auto industry in the United States, is now a dystopia plagued with crime and drugs. The RoboCop becomes a machine that rages against the machine in a recognisable age, of wild capitalism and vulgar upstarts and yuppies.

Ours is an era in which corporations dominate the political scene of the world, and in which minuscule pressure groups lobby such a first world concern! for social rights for cyborgs. Theres talk of Transhumanism, of post-humanism, of the obsolescence of the human body as weve known (and experienced) it for centuries. Considering the anticipatory function of speculative fiction (another name for sci-fi), it wouldnt be outrageous to conclude that our times are quite like those depicted in Verhoevens film.

For this, and for the way in which it satirises the world of business and media, RoboCop is a masterpiece that hasnt lost its force. Set up that dusty VCR and watch it again, even for the sake of nostalgia.

You wont be disappointed.

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Of robots and men - Buenos Aires Herald

July 21 at 8:04 PM

While Donald L. Rosss July 8 Free for All letter, Setting the record straight on Martin Luther, was on the right track in concluding that Luthers Reformation is only partially responsible for giving birth to the modern Western world, heconflated Renaissance humanism and the Reformation with a third revolution he did not mention: the scientific revolution. That observation is cemented by Rosss belief that Isaac Newtons Principia Mathematica in 1687 inspired the Enlightenment more than anything else. To say Renaissance humanism had begun at least 150years earlier in Italy, Ross must be counting back from Luthers 95 Theses on that Wittenberg church door in 1517 to the mid-1300s, when Francesco Petrarch rediscovered the letters of Roman politician and philosopher Cicero. In fact, Petrarch was so taken with Cicero that he described the 900 years of cultural stagnation that preceded his own time asthe Dark Ages.

In the 1450s, the Gutenberg Bible, the first major book printed using mass-produced movable metal type, marked the beginning of the printing revolution that spread information and learning to the masses and eventually played a key role in the Reformation and the Enlightenment. In 1605, the first modern newspaper was published in the Alsatian city of Strasbourg when Johann Carolus distributed a weekly journal in German by reporters from several Central European cities (giving rise to our use of the word press). The philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment came to dominate European ideas about individual liberty, progress, reason and religious tolerance in opposition to the fixed dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. But while the French like to place the Enlightenment between 1715, when King Louis XIV died, and 1789, when the French Revolution began, the case can easily be made that it actually started in the early 1600s, when the scientific revolution fostered questioning of orthodoxy both religious and scientific in favor of increased empiricism and scientific rigor. We all know what happened to astronomer Galileo in 1633 the Roman Inquisition confined him to house arrest for the rest of his life because he wouldnt agree that the sun circled the Earth. The scientific revolution and therefore the Enlightenment were well underway by the time Newton published Principia Mathematica.

George Diffenbaucher, Alexandria

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Setting the record straight on 'Setting the record straight on Martin Luther' - Washington Post