Daily Archives: December 25, 2021

Scotland reexamines its heritage in the age of Black Lives Matter – The Times Hub

Posted: December 25, 2021 at 6:11 pm

Home Entertainment Scotland reexamines its heritage in the age of Black Lives Matter December 25, 2021

Castles, gardens, villages One report designates around fifty historic sites as the result of the slave trade and slavery. A new woke madness for historian Robert Tombs.

Scandal in the Highlands. A 60-page report was commissioned by the National Trust for Scotland, the body responsible for the protection and promotion of Scottish heritage. Its title sounds like repentance: Facing our past!

Read alsoLeopold II, Edward Colston, Churchill Their statues vandalized or unbolted

On 885 kilometers of coastline, The organization owns and maintains a significant number of estates, gardens, buildings and collectionsLists Jennifer Melville, project manager. This report is, according to her, the first step which aims to become aware of the truth on Scotlands slave past. VShe heritage has been created, improved or financed by the suffering of others, she explains. We can bring these truths to life and address their complex history. Before justifying the writing of this report: Our public demands to know more about it.

Read alsoCanada: calls for the removal of colonialist symbols from public space

Among the 48 controversial sites, some are the most touristic in Scotland, like the dizzying Glenfinnan monument. This tower, 18 meters high, marks the beginning of the Jacobite uprising of 1719. Close to the shores of Loch Shiel and surrounded by mountains, the monument is today disputed, 302 years later, by this famous report. The latter explains that it was built by Sandy Macdonald, a wealthy businessman who made his fortune in Jamaica, during the height of the slave trade.

Read alsoNutcracker, considered racist, will it survive the era of cancel culture?

Focusing on slavery while ignoring its many other flaws exposes the madness of the woke view of history.

Robert Tombs, the story

This work also calls into question the role played by certain influential figures of the time, such as Charles Edward Stuart, the second contender for the Scottish and English crowns. According to this report, we must go back to 1745, shortly before the battle of Culloden, that the one also nicknamed Bonnie Prince CharlieWill lose, to understand where the problem comes from. Indeed, underlines the document of Jennifer Melville, the pretender sailed from Nantes a busy port in the transatlantic slave trade to the Hebrides, in the summer of 1745 on a French slave ship. The latter belonging to the wealthy shipowner, slave trader and plantation owner of Irish descent, Antoine Walsh.

Read alsoUnited States: Minneapolis commemorates the death of George Floyd

The bronze statue of the merchant slave Edward Colston was unbolted and then thrown into the water by protesters of the movement Black Lives Matter, On June 7, 2020 in Bristol. HANDOUT / AFP

This report could cheer up activists in the Black Lives Matter movement, who are already very active in Scotland. And especially in Edinburgh, where the statue of Henry Dundas, a politician who worked to delay the abolition of slavery, was covered in graffiti. Protests that have also arisen in England with the debunking of the statue of the slave merchant and English patron Edward Colston, in Bristol in the south-west of the country.

Focusing on slavery while ignoring its many other flaws exposes the insanity of the woke view of history.Explains historian Robert Tombs, in the column entitledWhy delete Bonnie Prince Charlie now?And published in The Telegraph . Before continuing: It seems to be the only thing that touches modern consciousnesses. Yet the slave trade was widely viewed as a bad business even then.

SEE ALSO Snow White: new victim of cancel culture?

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Scotland reexamines its heritage in the age of Black Lives Matter - The Times Hub

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LAPD Worked with Foreign Firm to Track Tweets About Defund the Police and BLM During 2020 Protests; Its Unclear How Data Was Used – Yahoo News

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The Los Angeles Police Department worked with a Polish strategic communications firm last year to track tweets related to Black Lives Matter and defund the police, according to documents obtained via a public records request by The Brennan Center.

The LAPD conducted a month-long trial of social media monitoring with Edge NPD, a company based in Warsaw, Poland.

LAPD Chief of Police Michel Moore speaks with protesters in the Fairfax District on Saturday, May 30, 2020 in Los Angeles, CA. Protests erupted across the country, with people outraged over the death of George Floyd, a black man killed after a white Minneapolis police officer pinned him to the ground with his knee. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The fall 2020 trial period included tracking 200 keywords and resulted in the collection of millions of tweets, including thousands related to Black Lives Matter and the movement to defund the police.

Edge NPD previously had no experience working with law enforcement.

The companys CEO, Dobromir Cias, told The Guardian the LAPD wanted to respond to negative narratives during the height of nations reckoning with racism and police violence, while flagging potential threats.

The trial was offered to the LAPD at no charge and was supposed to serve as a demonstration of the monitoring technology, but was not intended to monitor specific Black Lives Matter activists, Cias said.

A Twitter spokesperson told The Guardian in a statement the platform prohibits surveillance of activist organizations.

Twitter prohibits the use of our developer services for surveillance purposes. Period. We proactively enforce our policies to ensure customers are in compliance and will continue to do so, the spokesperson said.

The company said it suspended Edge NPDs developer account for violating the policies.

During the 40-day trial in October and November of 2020, the LAPD sought to collect social media data related to six topics, including civil unrest, American policing, domestic extremism and white nationalism, election security, potential danger and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Keywords the LAPD and Edge NPD discussed tracking during the trial included abolish the police, nojusticenopeace, police budget, and police killing.

Cias suggested BLM and defund the police be added to the list. An LAPD official agreed BLM would be good to add to the list, but noted that many people use the phrase to discuss legitimate rights.

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Cias also said he would personally send tweets to the LAPD that looked kind of dangerous, during the trial, but added that he didnt verify the legitimacy of the information in the tweets he passed along.

When youre passing this information, you dont really know how serious it is. I think its up to law enforcement to really verify if its true, Cias told The Guardian. We dont do fact checking.

About 270,000 of the 2 million tweets collected during the trial were related to American Policing, according to the Brennan Center.

Flagged tweets included those that highlighted racism in American or called on LAPD chief Michael Moore to resign.

The LAPD did not establish a long-term contract with Edge NPD after the trial, although the company proposed a $150,000 agreement. However, the LAPD has looked into similar monitoring services offered by at least 10 other companies.

Its not clear what the police department did with the collected data.

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LAPD Worked with Foreign Firm to Track Tweets About Defund the Police and BLM During 2020 Protests; Its Unclear How Data Was Used - Yahoo News

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The Memo: Nation’s racial reckoning plays out in 2021’s big trials | TheHill – The Hill

Posted: at 6:11 pm

Americas reckoning with racial justice moved from the streets to the courtroom in 2021, with complicated results.

In April, former police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd on a Minneapolis street 11 months before, in what was widely seen as a landmark decision.

Another landmark of a starkly contrasting kind came in November, when 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on all counts after fatally shooting two people and wounding a third during race-related unrest in Kenosha, Wis.

The killers of Ahmaud Arbery were found guilty of murder in Georgia in a November trial that proved a majority-white jury was willing to convict white civilians for the murder of a Black man even in disputed circumstances.

In a less serious and more bizarre case, actor Jussie Smollett was found guilty in December of having set up a hoax attack on himself. Smollett, who is Black and gay, had claimed he had been set upon in Chicago in January 2019 by two assailants shouting about MAGA country.In fact, he had paid two brothers to stage the attack.

As usual with the tangled topics of race, policing and the justice system, there is no simple message to be drawn from the cases in total.

Instead, they showed a nation at times edging toward a new consensus on the most egregious examples of racial injustice and at other times retreating into old trenches.

The Chauvin case was arguably the most emotive of all, centered on the killing that had sparked global protests and given new vigor to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

Before the verdict came, there was widespread doubt in the Black community that a jury would convict a former police officer for murder. Comparisons were drawn to the case of Rodney King a generation before. Police officers in Los Angeles were captured on video savagely beating King and were acquitted on all charges.

But the jury did convict in Minneapolis, finding Chauvin guilty of all three counts for which he was tried, the most serious being second-degree murder. The 45-year-old Chauvin was sentenced in June to more than 22 years in prison.

In the immediate aftermath of the guilty verdict, President BidenJoe Biden Harris tests negative for COVID-19 after close contact with aide Standing with Joe Manchin Holiday caller to Biden: 'Merry Christmas and let's go Brandon' MORE called the Floyd family, saying he was relieved by the conviction. Publicly, Biden said that Chauvin had committed murder in full light of day and that the jurys decision amounted to basic accountability.

But was the Chauvin verdict a harbinger of a new era in terms of law enforcement facing the full measure of justice forits actions?

Its simply unclear.

Civil rights activists pointed out that the murder of Floyd, though emblematic of the broader ills of police brutality, was unusual in its specifics.

In Floyds case, a cellphone video shot by a bystander captured Chauvin kneeling on his victim for more than nine minutes as Floyds distress grew and onlookers urged the officer to stop.

The video was horrific and Chauvins conduct blatantly inexcusable. Virtually no one, of any political persuasion, sought to justify what Chauvin had done. Then-President TrumpDonald TrumpHoliday caller to Biden: 'Merry Christmas and let's go Brandon' Biden's muddled trade policy US deserves a 21st Century Supreme Court MORE, who regularly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement while defending police, called the circumstances of Floyds death terrible.

Darnella Frazier, the teenage girl who shot the video, was later honored with a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize committee.

The broader questions raised by Floyds murder seemed to get murkier as the year wore on, however.

On Capitol Hill, efforts to enact police reform failed. Rising rates of violent crime in many cities spurred debate as to whether criticism of the police had gone too far, disincentivizing officers from properly doing their jobs. Electorally, the slogan defund the police was widely held to have become a millstone for Democrats, even though only a small minority of the party backs the goal.

In any event, the brief moment of national consensus around Floyds murder had thoroughly broken down by the time Rittenhouse faced a jury in November.

His case became a classic Rorschach test, with critics seeing him as a gun-toting vigilante anddefenders viewing him as a young man of basically good intentions who became a victim of circumstance.

At his trial, even some of the prosecution witnesses delivered exculpatory evidence. The one man who survived being shot by him, for example, noted that he was himself armed with a pistol and that it was only after he aimed his gun at Rittenhouse that the teen had fired.

Those kinds of details, in turn, spurred criticism of earlier media reporting on Rittenhouses actions.

The verdict, predictably, was hailed by the right and lamented on the left. Sen. Ron JohnsonRonald (Ron) Harold JohnsonMcConnell urges Thune to run for reelection amid retirement talk The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by National Industries for the Blind - US reeling from omicron; Manchin-Biden aftershocks Thune, Johnson say decisions on reelection bids expected soon MORE (R-Wis.) said that justice has been served. Rep.Jerry NadlerJerrold (Jerry) Lewis NadlerHouse Judiciary asks for expanded probe of FBI response to Portland protests The truth of Jan. 6 is coming to light accountability will fall to the courts House passes bill to expedite financial disclosures from judges MORE (D-N.Y.) saw instead a miscarriage of justice.

In December, controversy stirred again over Rittenhouse when he was accorded a heros welcome at a conference staged by a conservative group, Turning Point USA.

The Rittenhouse episode was so potent that it hung over the very different trial relating to Arberys death, which concluded later the same month.

In that instance, the conviction of a father and son, Travis and Gregory McMichael, along with a neighbor, William "Roddy" Bryan, was seen as a long-awaited vindication for campaigners.

The Arbery killing had barely elicited national attention until cellphone video shot by Bryan emerged. The resultant outrage, in turn, led the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to take over the case from local law enforcement. The woman who was the local prosecutor at the time was indicted earlier this year for allegedly showing bias in favor of the McMichaels.

When the guilty verdict came, Sen. Jon OssoffJon OssoffOssoff announces birth of first child Former Sen. Johnny Isakson dies at 76 Four questions for Jerome Powell on equality and accountability MORE (D-Ga.) pointedly stressed the historic civil rights mobilization that he said had been necessary to achieve justice.

Biden again weighed in, calling the case a devastating reminder of how far we have to go in the fight for racial justice in this country.

That fight faces an uncertain immediate future, however.

With a midterm election year looming, partisan fights over policing, crime and the broader topic of wokeness all in some ways proxies for older fights over race are sure to ramp up.

How that process plays out in a nation already riven by tension and polarization is anyones guess.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.

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The Memo: Nation's racial reckoning plays out in 2021's big trials | TheHill - The Hill

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Rationalism and mystification. On the formal pathetic of being against – DocWire News

Posted: at 6:09 pm

This article was originally published here

Z Relig Ges Polit. 2021 Nov 26:1-20. doi: 10.1007/s41682-021-00095-9. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

The article presents the results of the interpretation of qualitative interviews with coronavirus critics. It focuses on the forms of social criticism manifested in the interviews. The analysis (1) shows that the critique is based on a rationalistic ideal of crisis resolution. The fact that the coronavirus crisis, from this point of view, is not dealt with rationally is seen as an indication that there is something fundamentally wrong with it. It is this problem that the conspirituality of the critics reacts to: a combination of conspiracy theory and esoteric ideas whose unity is based on the interest in the mysterious. The analysis (2) allows to determine the specific style of the critique of counter-measures as formal pathetics: Substantially, it remains relatively empty, while rhetorically it is emphasized all the more emphatically. The rhetorical means are the most drastic comparisons possible, the romanticism of the heroic resistance and the claim to be committed to the well-being of children. Finally, (3) we put forward a socio-theoretical embedding of the critique of counter-measures, which assumes with Eisenstadt that modern society is characterized by an erosion of the foundations of all certainty. This leads to a fundamental credibility problem, manifesting itself in the loss of confidence in central social institutions (politics, science, medicine, media). The criticism of counter-measures expresses that in an ideal-typical way.

PMID:34938949 | PMC:PMC8620311 | DOI:10.1007/s41682-021-00095-9

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Rationalism and mystification. On the formal pathetic of being against - DocWire News

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From headless angels to boiled children: A brief history of macabre Christmas cards by the worlds greatest artists – The Indian Express

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In 1843, English civil servant Sir Henry Cole, who would become the first director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, asked his friend John Horsley to design what would become the first-ever commercially printed Christmas card. The first cards were hand-produced and each copy cost a shilling, which was more than the daily wage of many workers in the Victorian Age.

As printing methods improved and production costs went down, gifting Christmas cards became a very popular practice. But the artwork used on these cards to share seasons greetings have undergone many transformations since then.

More interestingly, starting from the Victorians macabre sketches to Spanish artist Salvador Dals surrealist experimentation, many Christmas cards over the ages have used artwork that challenged conventions, inspired awe and even provoked outrage.

Dals surrealist art would be a good point to start our journeyalbeit a non-linear oneinto the history of the most bizarre Christmas cards.

Born in the aftermath of World War I, surrealism was an artistic and literary movement that had a firm focus on channeling the unconscious to unlock the power of imagination. In a departure from the post-enlightenment logic of absolute rationalism and realism, surrealist art was illogical, absurdist and at times even unnerving as it thrived on biomorphic and dream-like imagery.

In surrealism, there is something awkwardly unsettling about the juxtaposition of images that break the chain of causality, when one moment or expression leads to another without any logical connection being established. The conflation of images gives rise to a sense of forced hybridity, as in the famous dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcocks Spellbound where free-floating eyes transform into painted curtains, which are shredded by a man with scissors; a scene succeeded by a game of cards and a man without a face.

Spellbound, starring Ingrid Bergman as a psychiatrist, capitalised on the rise of pop psychology in America in the light of the growing public interest in the work of German psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. For its dream sequence, Hitchcock had roped in Dal who had become synonymous with the surrealist movement that gained prominence in the early part of the 20th century.

The sequence from Spellbound in a way typifies the excesses of the surrealist movementeach image alluring as it provokes a sense of fear and desire, capturing the fragility of each moment as the next person or object makes an illogical and forced intervention. The montage becomes a visual hybrid of what Umberto Eco may call oneiric images.

Like most surrealists, a sense of forced displacement that causes shock was important for Dals art. In 1959, Hallmark approached him, paying an advance of $15,000 for submitting images for greetings cards. Dal ultimately submitted 10 images for Christmas cards, but most of them were considered to be too unsettling to be put into production.

By the late 1940s, Hallmark had started using paintings of contemporary artists on their Christmas cards. So, through the unsophisticated art of greeting cards, the worlds greatest masters were shown to millions of people who might otherwise not have been exposed to them, company founder Joyce Clyde Hall wrote in his autobiography.

By the time Hallmark approached Dal, it had used the art of Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Georgia OKeeffe on their Christmas cards. But Dals surrealist renditions of the Christmas tree and the Holy Family were considered to be too dangerous or avant-garde at that timeof the 10 images he submitted, only two were finally put into production.

The ones that were rejected included images of a headless angel playing a lute, a Christmas tree made of butterflies and a representation of three wise men riding camels.

Even the two images which were selectedThe Nativity and Madonna and Childhad the ebullient excesses that embodied Dals style. They marked a radical departure from depictions of the nativity scene or Madonna in high Renaissance art. The difference in Dals imagery is stark when compared alongside the magical transcendence embodied in a painting like The Mystical Nativity by Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli.

If Botticellis depiction elevates the senses to a state of spiritual transcendence, Dals art is marked by the spirit of irreverence that reduces the nativity scene to the mundaneness of everyday life.

The surrealists looked down upon high art as a form of bourgeois individualism. They focused on the everydayness of existence even as they deployed a stylised technique which was divorced from rationality and logic. In choosing their imagery, the focus remained firmly on, what Andr Breton in his 1924 Surrealist manifesto calls, psychic automatism, which is to be exercised in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic concerns. This free play of images, with the objective of giving an unbridled reign to the unconscious, was supposed to produce images which lacked logical explanations and causal connections, resulting in a sense of shock and awe.

The forced juxtaposition of images produced this effect even in surrealist poetry. For example, in Bretons Free Union (1931), he writes: My wife with her figure of an otter between the tigers teethMy wife with temples the slate of a hothouse roof/With eyebrows the edge of a swallows nestMy wife with wooden eyes always under the axe

This penchant for using images to produce a sense of shock was also a hallmark of the Dadaist movement which many believe sowed the seeds of surrealism. A notorious moment that became a high point of the movement was in 1917 when Marcel Duchamp submitted a mens urinalplayfully signed R. Muttand titled Fountainfor the New York Society of Independent Artists exhibition.

Much like his other paintings, Dals art for the Christmas cards was considered too obtuse and outrageous during his time. For all his obsession with ants and molten clocks, his art was subsumed by the metaphoric potential of images.

American artist Andy Warhol drew a series of blotted line Christmas cards in the 1950s. The pope of pop, as he came to be known, designed some of these for Tiffanys and even featured in a couple of Christmas card catalogues for the Museum of Modern Art.

But these are among his least remembered works. Unimpressed with his efforts, one of his clients in the 1950s reportedly remarked: He gave us a whole series of little funny drawings for Christmasthey were his original drawings, little sketches of an angel, or a cat all bright redbut hardly anything was suitable for Christmas. They werent very appealing.

But among the works that brought him fame were Warhols paintings with Christian imagery. He drew the Monalisa series in 1963 by using silkscreena stenciling technique for surface printing which was developed in the 1900sto duplicate Leonardo da Vincis famous painting. This was followed by the Jackie series which rendered Jackie Kennedy as a figure out of a piet modelled after Michelangelos creation.

In the 1980s, Warhol spent time working on his Modern Madonna series for which he asked mothers to sit while they nursed their babies. He was subsequently offered a million dollars by art dealer Alexander Iolas to produce his Last Supper series.

Despite the overtly Christian imagery in this series, through his art he also tried to send out a message to fundamentalist Protestant evangelists and Roman Catholic bishops who denounced gay life. Warhol, who lived openly as a gay man, through his works in the series, particularly Be a Somebody with a Body, tried to address the homophobic biases and controversies surrounding AIDS which were dominating headlines at that time.

Long before the quirky experimentation by the modernists, the Victorians taste for the macabre played out in the form of weird artwork on their Christmas cards. This was an age when Santa Claus had not been commercialised and Hallmark was not yet established.

It was only in 1881 that cartoonist Thomas Nast (Baghsaw) represented Santa Claus in a form which we would recognise today. The representation in Harpers Weekly went on to become a recurring concept on Christmas cards.

Before that, animals, flowers and foliage along with seasonal greetings were very common. But using bizarre representations, which by modern standards could be considered inappropriate for the purpose of cheering up spirits, were also in vogue. Among the disturbing Christmas cards which were popular back then are the ones with images of dead birds, murderous frogs and children being boiled.

A wide range of animals and birds were used in the artwork but there was a common recurring theme of death. Many experts have attributed this to the low life expectancy and high mortality rate during harsh winters in the Victorian era.

Many of the images were nightmarish. Coloured sketches of rosy-faced children spreading cheer would be tempered with a turnip wearing a hat, dead robins, glum-faced animals and sinister food items leaping out. Amid the spirit of Christmas cheer, there was a ubiquitous and omnipresent feeling of dark foreboding and death.

At the same time, the practice of using Christmas imagery in the form of Jesus Christ, angels, crosses, sheep and carols on Christmas cards was extremely popular. T.H.S. Escott in Social Transformations of the Victorian Age writes: The Victorian age is in fact above all others an age of religious revival. Historians like Owen Chadwick note that the clergy became more zealous from the middle of the 1850s as they conducted worship more reverently, knew their people better, understood a little more theology, said more prayers, celebrated sacraments more frequently, studied the Bible, preached shorter sermons.

The propensity to experiment with the bizarre, often perhaps to explore the redemptive and radical potential of art, has endured the test of time. Centuries after the Victorians used images of dead birds and long after the headless angel of Dal, the most recent Christmas cards to have provoked curiosity and condemnation in equal measure are by street artist Banksy.

Among the controversial Christmas graffiti by Banksy is a representation of the nativity scene in which Joseph and Mary are blocked from reaching Bethlehem by the Israeli West Bank barrier. The painting has been around till 2005 but had gone viral on social media recently following a renewed escalation of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

A few years ago, Birmingham residents discovered a reindeer wall graffiti which was widely considered to be the work of Banksy. Subsequently, the artist himself shared on Instagram the video of a homeless man lying down on a bench behind which the graffiti is visible on the wall. As Ill Be Home for Christmas played on in the background, Banksys subversion of the figure of Santaimagined here not as a deliverer but a common man rendered powerless by the forces of global capitalis both poignant and powerful.

In 2020, a Banksy Christmas card, which showed Raymond Briggss famous snowman bending over another while smoking a fag, sold for nearly 4,000 in London.

Many of Banksys Christmas cards had been first exhibited at popup galleries in the early 2000s. These exhibitions at centres around London and once in Palestine were usually sold out affairs.

As a popular anecdote goes, the street artist had once just entered one of his exhibitions at a Santas Ghetto in London in 2003 only to find the police asking a staff member if Banksy was there. Im sorry I cant help. I dont know who Banksy is, the staff member reportedly lied. And Banksy, while looking at the paintings just like any other connoisseur of art, calmly walked out.

Andr Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, Translated by Helen R. Lane and Richard Seaver (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1972)

David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)

Salvador Dal, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal, Translated by Haakon M Chevalier (New York: Dover Publications, INC., 1993)

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From headless angels to boiled children: A brief history of macabre Christmas cards by the worlds greatest artists - The Indian Express

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Avoiding Technical Bankruptcy: a Whole-Organization Perspective on Technical Debt – InfoQ.com

Posted: at 6:07 pm

Key Takeaways

As software systems evolve, they tend to become less flexible and more difficult to work with. We often attribute this to rampant "technical debt", but fail to talk about what causes it.

Technical debt is not primarily caused by clumsy programming, and hence we cannot hope to fix it by more skilled programming alone. Rather, technical debt is a third-order effect of poor communication. It is a symptom of an underlying lack of appropriate abstractions, which in turn stems from insufficient modelling of the problem domain. This means that adequate communication has not taken place; discussions and decisions to resolve ambiguity and make informed trade-offs have been swept under the rug.

What we observe and label "technical debt" is the by-product of this dysfunctional process: the reification of this lack of resolution in code. To fix the problem of accumulating technical debt, we need to fix this broken process.

The technical debt metaphor was introduced by Ward Cunningham to describe a process where developers make a conscious decision to ship code with known limitations into production. The purpose of shipping early is two-fold: to get quickly to market and to enable a feedback loop from production back to further development and refinement. It quickly caught on, since it allowed developers to communicate "invisible" problems with the technical solutions to management and other stakeholders.

In the process of becoming widespread and popular, however, the meaning of the technical debt metaphor has also become diluted. Any code running in production that has limitations or quality problems may find itself labelled as technical debt. This is unfortunate, since it undermines the usefulness and the richness of the metaphor. Much of what is considered technical debt is incurred inadvertently over time, and with no clear strategy for paying it off.

It is regrettable that the meaning of the technical debt metaphor has been diluted in this way, but in language as in life in general, pragmatics trump intentions. This is where we are: what counts as "technical debt" is largely just the by-product of normal software development. Of course, no-one wants code problems to accumulate in this way, so the question becomes: why do we seem to incur so much inadvertent technical debt? What is it about the way we do software development that leads to this unwanted result?

These questions are important, since if we can go into technical debt, then it follows that we can become technically insolvent and go technically bankrupt. In fact, this is exactly what seems to be happening to many software development efforts. Ward Cunningham notes that "entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation". That stand-still is technical bankruptcy. It means that your organization can no longer move forward.

Reasonable changes to the software take an unreasonable amount of time to implement. Quality problems become permanent; you can't fix bugs without a very high chance of introducing new ones, leading to a sort of oscillation between problems.

If we are to understand the forces that drive the accumulation of inadvertent technical debt, we must look at the code and see how "technical debt" manifests itself.

My observation is that there tends to be a lot of ifs and buts, and little to communicate intent and aid understanding. By that I mean literally that there are many if and else branches in the code, and a great number of boolean flags to control execution flow between those branches. Whats missing are useful abstractions and boundaries to make sense of it all. This makes it difficult to isolate the code related to a single feature, since the code for that feature isnt isolated in any meaningful or obvious sense. It is difficult to predict the effects of changes, since changing a single boolean flag can have rippling effects throughout the codebase.

Code ends up like this when we have an underdeveloped, inadequate mental model of the problem were trying to solve with software. Softwares dirty secret is that we can implement solutions to problems we cant articulate clearly. If our software is "wrong", the correct behavior is always only an if-branch away. We just need a way to inject the right flag so that we can take the correct turn in the flow of execution instead of the wrong one. We can and do compensate for our poor domain models by using if-branches as epicycles. But this is exactly the cause of our problem with inadvertent technical debt: over time, we paint ourselves into a corner. It leads to incomprehensible software - technical bankruptcy.

We can no longer add functionality this way without breaking existing functionality.

It's very hard to write simple and precise code if we don't have the proper concepts in our heads. We need those concepts not only to structure our solution, but to think clearly about the problem in the first place. As long as we lack the proper concepts, both our thinking and our communication with others will be clumsy and roundabout. Imagine trying to tell someone a story about a dog without knowing the word dog or even the word animal. "It's one of those eager, four-legged living things that wag their tails". It sounds silly, but I've been in that situation many times on projects.

On one project I was on, we struggled with our credit card module. The code was complex and difficult to understand, and we had very inefficient and frustrating discussions whenever we talked about that module, but we couldn't really figure out why. It wasn't until we realized that we lacked a concept to describe how credit cards were associated with credit card deals (an "association mechanism"), that everything fell into place. Suddenly our heads cleared up, our discussions cleared up, and it was possible to implement very straightforwardly. We deleted all the clumsy code we had written up to that point, and replaced it with something that was trivial to understand.

This experience points toward a heuristic for tackling complex code - code that tends to get labelled "technical debt" after a while: look for missing or awkward concepts. Look for patterns of frustration in the design discussions in the team. Its probably the domain trying to tell you something. Trying to "fix" the code without the right concepts is likely to fail, since there is no elegant or clean organization of the wrong concepts.

I want to argue that our problems stem from an underdeveloped, inadequate mental model of the problem we're trying to solve with software. For software that is developed as group efforts, which is most software, that mental model needs to be shared among the people working on the software. Otherwise, it's no wonder that inconsistencies and corner cases come to bite us. If were not aligned on what the problem and the proposed solution is, then we should expect to see the consequences of those failures of alignment manifest themselves in the code. And we do.

The key to developing a sufficiently rich and flexible shared mental model is communication and collaboration. When software is weighed down by technical debt, that's a symptom that the organization developing the software probably needs to look at its communication and collaboration patterns.

Ward Cunningham invented the technical debt metaphor to enable developers to communicate to business people something that is visible to the former, but hidden from the latter; that while we shipped code now that meets the business requirement, we overstretched in doing so. Having done so has left us off-balance, and we need to spend some time regaining our balance. Otherwise we will eventually fall down and it's going to be hard to get up. But in a sense, that's an easy problem to fix: generously give the developers a bit of time every now and then to clean up in their own house, so to speak. All that's required from the business people is a little patience while the developers catch up.

Unfortunately, I dont think its going to work. If I'm right that much of what we label technical debt really stems from inadequate modelling of the business domain and ultimately is caused by communication and collaboration issues, it's not a problem that developers can solve on their own. In fact, thinking that the developers can and should handle technical debt alone is a symptom of the kind of thinking that leads to technical debt. Thats an uncomfortable insight for both developers and business people. It is convenient for business people to think of technical debt as something for IT to handle, and it is more comfortable for developers to think that all they need is a little time to get things right. But its a convenience and a comfort that we cannot afford if were going to address the root causes of technical debt.

The main problem for a software organization that finds itself close to technical bankruptcy is not the amount of debt itself, but rather that the organization in its current state produces unmanageable amounts of complex code inadvertently. There is little to be gained by chipping away at the incurred debt if we continue to produce new debt at the same rate as before. It can be very costly, time-consuming and risky to try to untangle code that is near bankruptcy. It is often better to find some way of replacing debt-heavy code with other code that has been produced in a healthier way. The best advice I can give is to try to incur less debt than we currently do, that is, reduce the amount of technical debt we have to reduce in the first place.

Over time, the best approach to reducing what we label "technical debt" is by addressing the root cause, which is how we work together. It can be difficult to change the culture of a software organization. Top-down initiatives will often struggle, since they fail to address the problems seen on the ground. Perhaps the best top-down initiative is to give leeway and autonomy to those on the bottom, since I believe it is possible to bring about positive change bottom-up.

My experience has been that doing software development as a group (i.e. ensemble programming) not only produces better designed solutions to problems quicker, but also creates a cultural shift towards more open, empathic and candid communication. This in turn means that teams doing ensemble programming are less likely to find themselves bogged-down in technical debt as time moves on. Moreover, having experienced improved communication within the team, ensembles are less likely to settle for poor communication across team boundaries as well, or between people with different roles in the organization. If this is true, then working in ensembles can have a positive rippling effect on the communication patterns of the organization.

The uncontrolled accumulation of inadvertently incurred technical debt is endemic in the software industry. The underlying cause for this tendency is that our communication patterns are inadequate. This leads to underdeveloped mental models, and developers approximating solutions to poorly articulated and understood problems by heaping on boolean flags and branching control flows.

Over time, software built this way becomes incomprehensible. The way to break this tendency is to change the way we build software: by collaborating and communicating better. Working in ensembles can be a step in the right direction, since it places collaboration and communication at the core of software development.

Einar W. Hst is a software developer at NRK, the Norwegian public broadcaster, where he helps build the TV streaming service. His main interests are domain modelling, API design and computer programming. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Oslo. You can find him on Twitter as @einarwh or read his blog.

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Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs approved to buy fashion line out of bankruptcy – Reuters

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Sean Combs arrives at the Met Gala in New York, May 7, 2018. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

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(Reuters) - Sean Diddy Combs has secured court approval to buy back his fashion brand Sean John from its bankrupt owner, GBG USA Inc.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michael Wiles in Manhattan signed off on the sale during a brief hearing on Wednesday. There were no objections to the sale.

Combs' company SLC Fashion LLC made the highest bid for the brand at an auction on Monday, bumping its final offer to $7.55 million from its initial $3.3 million bid. Four other bids were submitted prior to the auction, GBG attorney Erin Ryan said during the hearing.

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The sale is expected to close by the end of the year.

GBG filed for bankruptcy in July with around $238 million in long-term debt, blaming its financial strain on the combination of a decline in brick-and-mortar shopping, the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and substantial royalty obligations. Most of its revenue was made by distributing its products to department stores and other retailers including Macy's, Costco, TJMaxx and Nordstrom.

Combs launched Sean John in 1998.

The case is In re GBG USA Inc, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, No. 21-11369.

For GBG: Rachel Strickland, Andrew Mordkoff, Ciara Sisco and Erin Ryan of Willkie Farr & Gallagher

For SLC Fashion: Alec Ostrow of Becker, Glynn, Muffly, Chassin & Hosinski

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Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Maria Chutchian reports on corporate bankruptcies and restructurings. She can be reached at maria.chutchian@thomsonreuters.com.

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Red River bankruptcy hearing delayed in Texas court – WANE

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FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) A hearing related to the Red River Waste Solutions bankruptcy filing was postponed. It was originally scheduled to be December 20, but court documents now show it scheduled for the morning of December 23.

Red River filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October, in part, citing the pandemic for causing increases in missed collections because it wasnt able to hire more employees to keep up with increased trash from more people staying home.

Last week an attorney for the city of Fort Wayne told the Solid Waste Advisory Board that in court documents, Red River said Fort Wayne is a losing contract and that Red River is losing more money than they are making.

As part of its bankruptcy reorganization, Red River can choose to keep or reject its contract with Fort Wayne. The rescheduled hearing was requested by Argonaut Insurance Company, which is the surety company for Red Rivers contract with Fort Wayne. A surety company provides a bond to guarantee that, in this case, Red River would perform as required in its contract with Fort Wayne.

This is an emergency motion from this third party, the third party is the surety, Corporate Attorney Apexa Patel, said. So, theyre saying they want the court to shorten the time that Red River would have to either assume the contract or reject the contract. And the reason is the longer Red River takes [to decide], the longer time that fines can be assessed and they, theoretically the surety, would be on the hook for it. So, its the surety company that requested the emergency hearing.

In other court documents filed in federal bankruptcy court in Texas on Monday, Red River named Stretto, Inc. as its claims and noticing agent. According to its website, Stretto is a company that specializes in managing corporate restructuring and bankruptcies.

Watch for more from Patel about Red Rivers contract with Fort Wayne and whats next in the legal process throughout this week on WANE 15.

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Hello Living staves off foreclosure on East Flatbush project, for now – The Real Deal

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Hello Livings Eli Karp and 1580 Nostrand Avenue (Hello Nostrand)

Eli Karps Hello Living is making a do-or-die attempt to save its prized East Flatbush rental project.

Hello Living Developer Nostrand LLC, the corporate entity of the 1580 Nostrand Avenue project, made the filing in federal court in Rockland County on Tuesday, one day before lender Madison Realty Capital was set to hold a UCC foreclosure auction on the equity interests in the development.

In a strange twist, just hours before Hello Nostrand filed for Chapter 11, Brooklyn investor Abraham Leifer of Aview Equities, claimed to have a contract to buy the project for $83 million, including a $1 million down payment, according to a court filing. Leifers attorneys were seeking to stop the auction.

Neither Leifers attorney nor Leo Fox, Hello Livings bankruptcy attorney, responded to requests for comment.

By filing for bankruptcy, Hello Living has, at least temporarily, halted the auction and remains in control of the property. The Brooklyn-based firm can now seek out rescue financing. It is unclear what will happen with Leifers alleged contract for the property.

Karp said in an affidavit that Madison is alleging claims of over $69 million. He said he will attempt to settle with the lender, his one-time adversary.

A Brooklyn native, Karp sought to construct luxury rentals in an area that had yet to be gentrified, south of Prospect Lefferts Gardens near Little Caribbean. He bought the site for $13 million in 2014. Of the 210 units planned at Nostrand Avenue, 95 are completed, a marketing brochure for the property shows.

Karp alleges he was wiped out of business by Madison. After buying a number of loans, the lender manufactured defaults, on his loans for 1580 Nostrand Avenue in order to charge millions of dollars in default interest at a rate of 24 percent, Karp claims.

He alleges that Madison Realty forced the loan into a forbearance plan that required him to take out a $8.3 million mezzanine loan, of which $4.5 million went to pay default interest. Madison then filed the UCC notice.

Madison has strongly denied the allegations.

The lenders lawyers argued that Karp voluntarily agreed to take on the mezzanine debt and the terms of the loan. When he did not meet those terms, Madison took action.

In late October, a New York Supreme Court judge in Rockland County ruled in favor of Madison, allowing the lender to go forward with the sale of the equity interests and most likely take control of the property.

A month later, a judge in Brooklyn also sided with the lender, granting Madisons motion to dismiss Karps fraud allegations. Karp is appealing that decision.

Greg Corbin, a bankruptcy and foreclosure specialist at Rosewood Realty, has been spearheading the UCC sale.

Faced with foreclosure, developers often will put their projects corporate entity into bankruptcy, which gives them additional time to restructure and secure financing to pay off lenders.

Madison Realty Capital, led by Josh Zegen, Brian Shatz and Adam Tantleff, is among the more active lenders in New York Citys commercial real estate market.

UCC foreclosures are ticking up across New York. Traditional foreclosures are still banned under a statewide moratorium, but in a UCC proceeding, the lender takes control of indirect equity interests in a property, not the property itself. That remains legal.

Contact Keith Larsen

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IndyBar: Thank You, US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Indiana Pro Bono Volunteers! – Indiana Lawyer

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Home IndyBar: Thank You, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Indiana Pro Bono Volunteers!Related News and Opinion

The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Indiana wishes to say thank you to the following attorneys for the many hours theyve volunteered to assist underrepresented individuals. Their efforts have allowed petitioners to obtain the fresh start afforded to honest debtors by the Bankruptcy Code.

John Allman

Kayla Britton

Penny Carey

Ben Caughey

Michael Cox

Morgan Decker

Darrell Dolan

Timothy Fox

Keith Gifford

Christine Jacobson

Lloyd Koehler

Eric Lewis

Konstantine Orfanos

Scott Racop

NiCale Rector

Eric Redman

Joseph Ross

Tom Scherer

Richard Shea

Andrea Wasson

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IndyBar: Thank You, US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Indiana Pro Bono Volunteers! - Indiana Lawyer

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