Category Archives: Freedom

ABOUT FOUR miles from where I live in Chicago is a nondescript office building where police take people to be held incommunicado and, according to press reports, tortured. The site is called Homan Square. It has long been notorious among activists and lawyers working on police brutality. It is, they say, a place where they take black and brown and poor kids who cant afford to hire private counsel while theyre in custody.

Homan Square came to national attention in 2015 when journalist Spencer Ackerman of the UK newspaper The Guardian published a detailed story about prolonged detention and violence against suspects at the facility.

Homan Square has since played an ambiguous role in the citys political life. In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement called for its closure. At the same time, its specter likely enervates local democracy. Work by the political scientists Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman has shown that police contact with Black and Latino communities, especially when it involves violence, doesnt just instill a fear of the state on the street. It also makes people less likely to vote or otherwise participate later in the political process. Homan Square may provoke activism on the street, but its shadow probably also blocks the ballot box.

I find Homan Square a useful place to start thinking about the ambivalent and complex meanings of the word freedom. In part, this is because its very literally close to home, but also because it presents a particularly gripping instance of the loss of freedom. Indeed, it seems intuitive to me, and I suspect to many, to say that freedom of an important sort is at stake in Homan Square. But what kind of freedom? And what variety of freedom is needed to resist a powerful and entrenched state institution that uses its powers in a coercive and destructive way? What sort of freedom must be constrained in the process?

The term freedom is the eponymous subject of historian Annelien de Dijns new book, Freedom: An Unruly History. Her core point is that concern about freedom against the state and so the Homan Squares of the world is both a recent and a disreputable invention. Instead, she maps out a long tradition of Western thinking, running back to ancient Greece, that construes freedom in terms of the ability to exercise control over the way you are governed. In this view, a state is free because of the way in which people participate in its rule, and in particular, if and only if they rule themselves. This is an idea of freedom partially captured in famous terms, such as the French liberal thinker Benjamin Constants liberty of the ancients and more ambiguously by Oxford don Isaiah Berlins baggy and discordant idea of positive liberty.

De Dijns story might readily be taken as an imaginative dilation of Constants phrase across history. She insists on a singular and linear genealogy. Her understanding of freedom starts from a contrast that the ancient Greek historian Herodotus drew between free Greeks and enslaved Persians. Her freedom then finds footing in the political practices of the Greek city-states, takes wing in the Roman Republic, and is recapitulated by the humanists Petrarch and Machiavelli during the Renaissance. Echoing John Pococks well-known account of a republican tradition in political thought (no relation to the present political party), her freedom then leaps over the channel to inspire English thinkers like James Harrington and from there somersaults into action through the Atlantic Revolutions of the late 18th century.

If you feel slightly breathless after those last few sentences, then you have a pretty good sense of how the books narrative feels. Historical figures flash by like sights from the top deck of the Big Apple tour bus. Now its Trajan! Eusebius! Augustine! Ambrose! And then Dewey! Roosevelt! Hayek! It is a certain tribute to de Dijns command as a writer that the book doesnt collapse into one-damn-thing-after-another-ism; its a close shave. It helps that she tacks sharply every once in a while from the history of ideas to political history. Yet when she does move from text to practice, her grip slips. Lumping together Sparta and Athens into a single category of democratic self-governing states, for example, is a touch odd, the kind of simplification only an economist could love. (Sparta, of course, was never really a democracy at all. The historian Xenophon called it a kingship. The Spartans themselves called it a eunomia, or a submission to the right kind of laws.)

Still, taken as a tour dhorizon of a selective, loosely linked chain of famous European and American thinkers, de Dijn offers good value for your money. All the stars are here, shuffling by to say their piece for or against democracy. Ironically, other recent intellectual histories, such as Margaret Jacobs The Secular Enlightenment and Jonathan Res Witcraft, make more room for lesser luminaries and ordinary punters. De Dijn is much less demotic, but no more democratic, in her choice of reading. Hers is a great man history with a vengeance.

But at the beginning of the 19th century, a dangerous betrayal awaits. In the wake of the Atlantic Revolutions, a new sense of freedom bursts onto the scene: freedom as a constraint upon the states actions. This idea of freedom is, were insistently told, but a cynical play by soulless Bourbon counterrevolutionaries and periwigged Regency Tories to hijack the noble idea of freedom. The celebration of this knock-off ideal was a chance to turn the knife back upon new-wrought democracies, still teething in their revolution crib.

For many, de Dijn observes, the Terror that followed the French Revolution was a turning point. The American Noah Webster (of dictionary fame), for example, went from understanding the problem of freedom in terms of free [i.e., democratic] government to focusing upon the difficulty of guarding against uncontrolled power. His dictionary would, against the historical grain that de Dijn celebrates, go on to define freedom as the right of citizens to go about their business in peace, security, and without molestation. Across the Atlantic, the same story unfurled. Mimicking his idol, Constant, the renowned French law professor douard de Laboulaye would write books such as The State and its Limits in celebration of the principle of laissez-faire, laissez-passez. Not far behind him is Hayek, with other neoliberal ghouls in tow.

Lest the reader feel any uncertainty about where their loyalties should rest, de Dijn makes plain that this later vision of freedom from the state is a disreputable, Johnny-come-lately notion. Pulling no punches, de Dijn calls it a battering ram aimed at toppling democracy. On this account, there is at least a whiff of false consciousness in the demands to close Homan Square and to end police brutality in all its sundry forms. Protesting the racist violence of the Chicago police, in this view, has nothing to do with freedom.

The main arc of de Dijns story is familiar not only because the thread from Athens to Florence to Philadelphia has already been drawn by Pocock (brilliantly) and many others (with more middling results). More importantly, her story is also familiar because it is, of all things, redolent of Star Wars: the old, good Republic, which endures for so long, comes a cropper because of the sinister, antidemocratic machinations of dark-hooded imperial types. It is a story of good, undone by a sinister evil along the way.

As much as I like Star Wars, its too pat a narrative arc. As de Dijns elision of Sparta into the celebratory story of Greek (really, mostly Athenian) democracy suggests, the amount of compression required to tell a story spanning centuries allows for dubious jump cuts. Concision demands choice, but she does not always give a candid explanation of why those choices were made. To construct her long tradition, de Dijn dwells on a couple of intervals in a handful of the Classical Greek polities. She has to cabin Socratic, Platonic, and Neoplatonic thought. And then she must leap to an idolization of the Roman Republic, before pole-vaulting over most of the Christian tradition to the Renaissance (1,000 years in a blink!). She then attends unctuously to Machiavellis admiration of the Roman Republic less so to his musky locker-room glee in the machismo of the armed civilian as the republics bastion. De Dijns is assuredly an imagined, actively constructed tradition. It is pieced together from fragments found hither and yon to serve a plainly presentist end.

Indeed, de Dijns book is very much of the moment. Casting stones on the idea of freedom against the state, and slighting Berlins negative rights, is much in vogue these days. Its maestro is Samuel Moyn, who has catalyzed a veritable cottage industry of attacks upon negative human rights. Helena Rosenblatts more subtle retelling of the liberal story also offers a fascinating juxtaposition of democracy and liberalism that de Dijn echoes in some of her chapters.

It is not just that one has to squint hard to see de Dijns long tradition. It is that when it comes into focus, it doesnt really seem like a single thing. What it meant for a Mediterranean city-state in 400 BCE to govern itself is very different from what self-government is in, say, post-Revolutionary France or the United States. The forms and constitutional mechanisms needed for effective self-government have changed radically as scale and technology mutate. As the polity scales up, shedding the Attic polities distaste for foreigners (metics) and slaves, new problems of managing difference arise. The Attic fondness for ostracizing citizens deemed errant voting them into 20-year exile isnt appetizing today. For good reason, the first democratic constitutions written at the end of the 18th century look nothing like democratic constitutions drafted at the end of the 20th century. The meaning of ruling oneself a phrase that de Dijn takes as self-evident thus has had radically different institutional implications as time has passed. A historical account of democratic freedom that suppresses all that variation is one with much to hide.

In her acknowledgments, de Dijn explains that the idea for the book was born while she was a postdoc at Berkeley in 2009. She had run into a bunch of protestors denouncing Barack Obama as on par with Hitler for his support of the Affordable Care Act. Reasonably enough, this struck her as ludicrous. Her account of freedom is an effort to redeem the word from idiots such as Samuel Fisher, one of the January 6 rioters who stormed the capitol building. The soi-disant dating coach posted a photo of himself, a rifle, and a shotgun with the caption, Cant wait to bring a liberal back to this freedom palace.

Of course, this is piffle. But that doesnt mean that every counterargument to it is correct. The tradition of freedom that de Dijn favors also has its fair share of meretricious rot. Take the Facebook group Stop the Steal, which became an early hub for President Trumps efforts to delegitimate the November 6 election. Stop the Steal took the idea of the peoples freedom to rule themselves and weaponized it against democracy. The enemies of self-rule do not come, as de Dijn seems to think, handily labeled as such. There are far better ways than hers to defend an understanding of freedom refracted through European traditions of social democracy against freedoms upstart American varietal.

Despite a summer of protests under the BLM banner, the Homan Square facility hums along. Protest has done tragically little. But little more has been achieved by the ordinary exercise of what de Dijn would call democratic freedom via the election of a new mayor trailing promises of reform. This should not be a surprise. Writing at the dawn of what de Dijn calls modern liberty, Constant suggested that the liberties of the ancients and the moderns should not be opposed; he urged his readers to learn to combine the two together. A history of the freedom that teaches us how to do that, against the riptide of a growing carceral state and powerful private capital that encases democratic bodies, would be something truly worthwhile. Alas, de Dijns book isnt it.

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Freedom's Just Another Word - lareviewofbooks

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

John Stuart Mill

In my field of negotiation, the interests of the individual need to be balanced with the interests of others. A one-sided approach inevitably leads to division and enmity. A negotiation succeeds when the focus is on cooperation and on meeting joint interests, rather than on winning at the expense of others.

The COVID-19 virus has crashed into an American culture that in some quarters emphasizes rights over responsibilities, individualism over community, and suspicion over trust.

This has caused social upheaval and conflict between the interests of individuals and the interests of the larger community. Governments and health care providers are trying to mitigate the impact of the pandemic, while some individuals vigorously guard their rights, believing that their personal liberties are under threat.

Economist John Stuart Mill believed that an individuals freedom to govern himself is absolute, until it comes into conflict with the freedoms of others. In his work On Liberty, Mill describes what he calls The Harm Principle, which explores the limits of individual rights as they relate to the rights of others and the community as a whole.

As Americans, we cherish our freedoms. Our inspired Constitution protects the liberty our founders fought so hard to gain, including religious and political freedom. These rights were enshrined in the First Amendment and remain central to American democracy. As the pandemic has trampled on our daily lives, it is understandable that we would hold tightly to freedoms that are central to our American identity.

This spring it appeared that the COVID-19 virus was on the decline, and we would be back to normal by the fall; however, the emergence of the delta variant has caused infections to rise markedly. Epidemiologists now tell us that the virus will likely be with us for the long term, and it is our collective responsibility to minimize the harm it creates going forward.

The perceived threat of the virus has ebbed and flowed over the past 18 months, and its future undulations are unpredictable. Current challenges include protecting the unvaccinated, understanding the impact of breakthrough infections and decreasing the opportunities for viral mutations. A year from now, the COVID-19-related issues we will confront will likely be different than those we face now.

During the pandemic, many have used a focus on personal freedom to justify not getting vaccinated. In doing so they have inadvertently put others in harms way by increasing their exposure to the virus. Their live and let live attitude has led to a live and let die reality.

As Americans, we are being asked to balance defending our personal freedoms with making good choices on behalf of others, particularly those unable to be vaccinated or who are otherwise vulnerable.

Freedom has often been used more as a sword than as the shield our founders intended. We have weaponized freedom rather than use it to defend and protect. Ironically, this hyperfocus on individual freedom impedes our ability to together defend other important freedoms, such as those of our heath and economic well-being.

Most people have good intentions. Those who have chosen not to get vaccinated or wear masks arent intentionally trying to cause harm to others; nevertheless, in many cases they are doing just that. The number of new cases is more than double what it was a month ago, nearly twice what it was a year ago, and it is predicted to continue rising until a significant majority of us are vaccinated. Those who are dying are no longer just the elderly and infirm; many are in younger age groups.

When we value individual liberty above our moral obligations to one another, especially the most vulnerable, we arent able to get the virus under control and push forward toward collective prosperity. A healthy path forward is to balance rights and responsibilities and to be willing to make the small sacrifices patriotic citizenship requires.

The turbulence and disruptions caused by this virus have exacerbated our increasing cultural divides. Only when we use our freedom to make choices that strengthen our community will our physical, mental and economic health be restored. Mending our cultural divides will not only help us find our way through the pandemic; it will prepare us to meet the inevitable challenges that we will face together in the future.

Stan Christensen teaches negotiation at Stanford University and at Brigham Young University and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Is COVID-19 taking away freedom? We must balance the liberties of everyone | Opinion - Deseret News

Team Encore has won the Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) Freedom Face-off today. The competition, organized to celebrate Indias 75th Independence Day on Aug. 15, had a prize pool of Rs. 210,000 (approximately $2,829).

Sixteen teams composed of professional players and content creators competed across two matches on Erangel and Sanhok to determine the champions. While the first match on Erangel took place in a third-person perspective, the second match on Sanhok was in a first-person perspective, a rare occurrence in PUBG Mobile esports. There was also a pan fight and fistfight towards the end.

Encore placed third in the first match with seven kills and earned a chicken dinner in the second game to place first in the overall standings.Team Scout had a tremendous first game after picking up the win and 15 kills. They faltered in the second match, however, and only took four points to finish second in the overall standings.

The top three teams have earned a share of the prize pool. Team Encore will get Rs. 85,000 (about $1,145) while second-placed Team Scout will earn Rs. 40,000 (approximately $539). Team Jonathan, which came in third place, will pocket Rs. 25,000 (around $337). Here are the overall standings for the BGMI Freedom Face-off.

Team Encore got another victory in the panfight and will take home an additional Rs. 30,000 ($404) for it. Shreeman Legends, which came in the last position in the main event, took first place in the fistfight and turned their fortune around. They will also get Rs. 30,000 (approximately $404) for this win.

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Team Encore wins the BGMI Freedom Face-off - Dot Esports

Even in the compressed historical arc of the pandemic, July 1st wasnt so long ago. The mood that morning, when President Bidens COVID-response cordinator, Jeff Zients, opened the White Houses weekly pandemic briefing, was unusually optimistic. Going into the Fourth of July holiday weekend, he said, Americans have good reason to celebrate. Zients, a wealthy businessman in his mid-fifties, had built a reputation within the Democratic Party for fixing impossible operational problems. At the dais in the White House briefing room, he spoke slowly and exactly, keeping his body still, so that he seemed something close to an embodied talking point. Deaths from the pandemic were down more than ninety per cent since January, he went on, and the countrys progress had exceeded expectations. This weekend, millions of Americans will be able to get togetherback together, not just with their families and close friends for small backyard cookouts, but with their community for larger festivals, parades, and fireworks, celebrating our countrys July Fourth Independence Day and the progress we have made against the virus together.

In retrospect, that optimism seems almost lurid. Even at the time, it raised eyebrows. When Zients appeared on Face the Nation three days later, Ed OKeefe opened the interview by citing the Delta variant and asking, Should we really be declaring independence right now from the pandemic? Whatever the right answer to that question waswhatever the White House should have been doingZients hadnt gone off the reservation. In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had liberalized its guidance on face masks, making clear that vaccinated people should feel free to go maskless indoors. On June 2nd, President Biden had promised Americans a summer of freedom and urged them toward a month of action to meet his goal of having seventy per cent or more of adults at least partly vaccinated by the Fourth of July. After Independence Day, Biden delivered an address in which he praised the country for having nearly hit that target. This is one of the greatest achievements in American history, and you, the American people, made it happen, Biden said. We are emerging from one of the darkest years in our nations history into a summer of hope and joy. The President, perhaps self-consciously, added, Hopefully.

In the liberal drama of the pandemic, the figures in the White House briefing room on July 1st were the good guys. Zients would turn the microphone over to Rochelle Walensky, a pioneering infectious-disease doctor whom the President had hired out of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital to run his C.D.C.; she emphasized the progress that had been made, even as she noted the remaining pockets of unvaccinated people who would be vulnerable to the Delta variant. Next up was Anthony Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whom Biden had elevated to the job of White House chief medical adviser. Faucis presentation was different in tone, if not substance, from Zientss. Next slide, he kept saying, to an aide, who would click to a new graph of data demonstrating that the existing vaccines were working well at preventing serious illnesses. As a matter of scientific process, the Biden Administration had clearly delivered on its campaign promises to restore integrity to the fight against the pandemic: the experts were at the lectern, carefully explaining vetted scientific data to the public.

Less than two weeks after Zients encouraged Americans to gather for larger festivals, a cluster of more than a thousand COVID-19 cases, including many among vaccinated people, were reported during Bear Week, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, when rain and bad weather had forced celebrations indoors. The event sounded the alarm about breakthrough infections and eventually helped push the C.D.C. to reverse its guidance on masking. From the mature vantage point of August, as the national average of daily cases surpassed the peak from the previous summer, before there was a vaccine, it is easy to think that staging such a gathering was profoundly unwise. The suggestion in the early summer that freedom was here, even as the Delta variant began to crest, now seems at best premature and at worst damaging to public trust. Very simply: As a matter of public health messaging, did the Administration blow it?

In the first year of the pandemic, a simple line of scrimmage was drawn. Democrats generally believed that the Trump Administration was handling COVID-19 with a disastrous laxity and an open hostility to science, and that far stricter measures were needed to stop the viruss spread. Republicans argued that such measures were too harsh and would be poison to the nations economysome conservative commentators even argued that deaths from COVID were a risk the country should be prepared to absorb to keep the economy strong. The focal point of these arguments was often Fauci himself. To Republicans, he embodied the myopic point of view, as the free-market health-policy expert Avik Roy put it to me, that anything that permits further transmission is not worth it. For Democrats, he was a beacon of scientific policymaking in a Trump Administration characterized by its indifference to the truth. Everything that made liberals admire Faucihis formality and age, the universal support he seemed to enjoy from scientists, his meticulousness (next slide)made conservatives roll their eyes. That pattern still holds: Mike Schneider, who tracks online political spending for the Democratic consultancy Bully Pulpit Interactive, told me this week that conservative groups spent five hundred thousand dollars between April and July on ads denouncing Fauci and calling for his removal.

But the Biden Administrations response to the Delta variant this summer has in some ways inverted the pandemic debate; instead of being attacked for doing too much, the White House has, this month, come under pressure for doing too little. On August 4th, Zeynep Tufekci, who studies the social impact of technologies at the University of North Carolina and who has become a prominent voice on pandemic policy, published an Op-Ed in the Times under the headline The C.D.C. Needs to Stop Confusing the Public. The evidence from overseas, she wrote, clearly suggested that the Delta variant posed a great threat to Americans, but the C.D.C., in May, stopped tracking breakthrough infections among the vaccinated unless they were hospitalized or worse, abandoning a good surveillance tool at a crucial moment. She also identified a pattern of confusing messaging from the White House. At the end of July, for example, Walensky insisted that masking was an individual choice for the vaccinated, just days before announcing that the Delta variant made it advisable for even the vaccinated to mask again. Throughout June and July, Tufekci wrote, I felt the same out-of-body experience I had in February 2020, when Covid-19 devastated Wuhan and Milan while Americans acted as if it would somehow miss them.

That same day, Donald G. McNeil, Jr., who had been the Times lead public-health reporter during the first year of the pandemic, published an essay with the title What Is Biden Waiting For? He excoriated the Administration for not moving more urgently to establish vaccine mandates and passports, and developing plans for booster shots should vaccine protections wane. Why is this administration so hesitant about saving American lives? McNeil wrote. We are running out of time.

Neither McNeil nor Tufekci is a medical doctor, and both are outsiders to the Administration. Cline Gounder, an infectious-disease specialist and epidemiologist at Bellevue Hospital, was a member of the Biden transition teams COVID-19 advisory board and co-hosted a pandemic podcast with the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain. She is less sweeping in her assessment of the Administrations public-health messaging. Honestly, I think its an impossible job, Gounder told me. But she also disagreed with some of the Administrations recent decisions. I think the C.D.C. did make a mistake pulling back on masks in May, Gounder said, emphasizing that there had been no passport or verification system to insure that people walking maskless into crowded indoor settings actually were vaccinated. The public, she went on, should not have been so surprised by the remergence of the virus last month; for all Bidens talk about a summer of freedom, the nature of a respiratory virus is to come in waves. Gounder said, This is something that we should have started preparing people for a year ago: that things are going to change, that they are going to change a lot over time, and that we are in essence in an evolutionary race with the virus.

The criticisms of the Biden Administrations handling of the pandemic echo, in some unexpected ways, the criticism of Trumps, especially in how much both Administrations counted on the vaccine. We put all of our eggs in the vaccine basket to the extent that we did almost nothing until the vaccine arrived, Michael Mina, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, told me, recalling 2020. That the vaccine was developed so quickly, and was so effective, made it seem almost magicalthe kind of gift that you might reasonably hope for from the most technologically advanced society in human history.

That focus on the vaccine has also defined this years pandemic response. We got so focussed on seventy per cent, Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, at the University of Minnesota, and another member of the Biden transition teams COVID-19 advisory board, told me. That number, he said, was always an administrative goal rather than a medical one. Show me any data that says seventy-per-cent vaccination in any country stops transmission. You cant. Theres no data. Then, too, there were scientific uncertainties about whether the vaccines protection would decay over time. And, even if it didnt, seventy per cent partial vaccination, Osterholm said, meant we have more than enough human wood for the coronavirus forest fires.

Even before Biden took office, public-health experts and pollsters understood that the vaccination campaign might struggle to reach members of two groups: people hesitant to take the vaccine, often because they were worried about how it might interact with prexisting health conditions or disrupt other aspects of their lives, and outright refusers. Many of the criticisms I heard this week centered on whether the Biden Administration had sufficiently prepared for a situation in which the vaccination campaign had been successful enough to limit much of the countrys mortality risk but not so successful that it snuffed out the virus: Tufekci emphasized the lack of surveillance of the disease, McNeil the decision not to mandate vaccines, Gounder the problem of verification, Mina the possibility that vaccines would grow less effective over time, and Osterholm the numerical insufficiency of a vaccine program, however technically impressive, that left tens of millions unvaccinated. Mina said, What does it mean to have an entire global economy thats really just depending on this spike-protein-based vaccine? That, I think, is very shortsighted. He added, There should have been a real emphasis in Trumps Administration and Bidens to figure out the other pieces.

Developing a vaccine relies on only a few very technically adept people rather than a pattern of broad coperation. In 2020, the message from the White House was often that the public should go about its business and let the scientists take care of the pandemic. In 2021, the message has been that the nation would have recovered fully if only the unvaccinated would do their part. Mina said, Its a public-health disaster, and you cannot beat a public-health disaster if you do not fully engage the public and get their trust, versus just telling everybody, You have to get vaccinated, and if you dont get vaccinated you are the problem. No. The virus is the problem.

Bidens election was billed as the most important step to restablish a scientific approach to the pandemic, and in many ways it has been. As McNeil, who covered the pandemic under the Trump Administration, reminded me by e-mail, The public health messaging of 2021 is a LOT better than that of 2020. Lets not forget that the official messaging we got included It will all be over by Easter, Herd immunity is just around the corner, The cure may be worse than the disease, More people are dying because of the lockdowns than from the virus, Hydroxychloroquine will cure this, Convalescent plasma will cure this, and Im a very stable genius. But removing a specific, truculent politician from the pandemic response didnt rid it of politics. Instead, it left the experts in the position of trying to manage a politically divided country in which the virus was evolving and many millions of people simply refused to be vaccinated. It has turned the scientists into politicians themselves.

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What Happened to Joe Biden's Summer of Freedom from the Pandemic? - The New Yorker

CINCINNATI While some businesses had trouble during the pandemic, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (NURFC) saw it as a chance to bolster resources and present their material to a larger audience.

"We were getting a lot of inquiries about resources from parents, and educators, especially how it relates to social studies, how it relates to the history and the legacy of the Underground Railroad," Chris Miller, the senior director of education and community engagement for the NURFC, said.

Miller said there have always been online learning resources available, but the pandemic really made it important to update and expand these resources.

"We had to really take, raise that up to be for the education team, our number one priority, actually, in seeing that there was a need for this learning to take place," he said.

Lesson plans were beefed up and online material was made more engaging, and this helped expand the reach of the NURFC.

"We are the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and so not only are we a resource for the Greater Cincinnati area, we are a resource for the nation," Miller said. "Increasing our digital presence allows us to live up to that platform."

People from all over the US, as well as Canada, have used the NURFC's online resources since the pandemic started. And with a greater push for racial equity over the past year, Miller thinks the NURFC can help educate people.

"If we're not able to live with one another, to respect one another, all the technology, all the advancements, we make technological advancements, it will mean nothing," Miller said. "It will render into nothing if we don't learn how to treat each other with respect and with greater humanity."

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Making It Work: The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center - WCPO

All Events

Vajra Master: H.H. Gangteng Tulku Rinpoche The Natural Freedom of the Nature of Mind DateAugust 20 (Fri) ~ 26 (Thu), 2021 Time6:00 ~ 8:00 am Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) Venue: Online via Zoom English Translator: Andrzej Rybszleger Eligibility: Those who have received the supreme Tantric empowerment Organizer: Yeshe Khorlo Ningmapa Buddhist Center Tuition Fee for seven daysIn view of the socio-economic impact brought on by the pandemic, please select the fee that you would be able to contribute based on your respective abilities (this fee includes offering to Rinpoche and translators) 1$110 for general students 2$55 for Monks/Nuns/those who needhttps://forms.gle/hR5fKKG571oBxX7G6 financial assistance H.H. Gangteng Tulku Rinpochetaughtthe Dzogchen teachings on Finding Rest in Illusion in his previous teaching. Rinpoche will now be teaching on the Trilogy of Nature Freedom, which is a trilogy of Dzogchen texts by Longchenpa, consisting of The Natural Freedom of the Nature of Mind, The Natural Freedom of Reality and The Natural Freedom of Equality. Rinpoche will start with the text The Natural Freedom of the Nature of Mind. In the current tumultuous times, Rinpoche has continued to organize various practices in Bhutan for all to accumulate good merits, remove obstacles and expound the Dharma to guide us on the correct path. Hence, all participants should listen to the teachings with the motivation and purpose to benefit all sentient beings. Registration Closing date Aug 18, 2021 Wed)

Daily Events:

TheHaidakhandi Universal Ashram is gradually opening. You can email us atinfo@babajiashram.org or call 719-256-4108. Thank you.

Morning meditation practice is postponed until further notice at Vajra Vidya Retreat Center. You may call 719-256-5539 for updates once the gathering together ban is lifted.

Weekly Events:

Sunday:

Energy Fair Volunteer meeting noon-5pm, potluck & networking 5-8pm, Town Hall Park, crestoneenergyfair@gmail.com

AA, 7pm. Currently only video conference meetings.Call Cheryl 303-667-9459 or John 719-429-8450 for info.

Monday:

Al-Anon, 1pm. Currently only video conference meetings. Call 970-218-6099 or 719-298-9133 for info.

Tuesday:

Continuing Ashtanga Yoga, Mysore Style Shakti Sharanam, 5-6:45pm by donation, shaktisharanam.com, 256-5668

NA, Currently only video conference meetings. Call970-309-0710 for info.

Wednesday:

Yoga Fundamentals & Refinements, Shakti Sharanam, 8:30-10am by donation, shaktisharanam.com, 256-5668

Food Distribution, Crestone Food Bank, next to Crestone Mercantile, 10am-noon

Community gatherings, Baca Park 5-8pm,email crestoneenergyexchange@gmail.com for more information

Thursday:

C/BG Indivisible Group meeting, Mystic Rose Caf patio, 11:30am

AA, noon. Currently only video conference meetings.Call Cheryl 303-667-9459 or John 719-429-8450 for info

Baca Library open, noon-6pm, 719-256-4100, http://nscld.colibraries.org

Continuing Ashtanga Yoga, Mysore Style Shakti Sharanam, 5pm-6:45pm, by donation, shaktisharanam.com, 256-5668

Peace Patrol meeting, Cloud Station Caf, 5pm, 719-315-4117

Saturday:

NA, 9am. Currently only video conference meetings. Call970-309-0710 for info.

Weekly teaching on Uddhava Gita with Sajohn Daverly. Savitri House dome, 83 Baca Grant Way, 719-937-7665, 10am-noon

Downtown Saturday Market, Little Pearl Park, Crestone

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Dzochen Trilogy of Natural Freedom of the Nature of Mind - Crestone Eagle

Hi there. Sunday night games remain trash, but at least I didnt spend like an hour going in a circle around the parking lot south of Audi Field I guess?

Recaps of D.C. Uniteds 5-2 loss to Nashville SC by us, WaPo, and MLS. Club and Country USA with the other sides take.

Recaps of the Washington Spirits 2-2 draw with the Houston Dash by us and WaPo and Equalizer Soccer.

Meanwhile, at the Spirit game, the NWSL Commissioner tweeting a selfie that includes Spirit owner Michelle Kang has to be noteworthy:

Recap: Loudoun gives up late goal in 1-0 loss (us): Played better, but a bad couple of bounces did it.

Meanwhile, congrats to Jeremy Garay, who will be with El Salvador against Costa Rica:

Rodney Wallace will retire a Timber (Stumptown Footy): Nice thing for the former D.C. United/Maryland Terrapin player.

Speaking of former D.C. United players, a Titi Rodriguez sighting!

Finally, Season 3 of FXs What We Do in the Shadows starts in a couple of weeks, and the trailer looks predictably fun:

See the article here:

D.C. soccer recaps, Rodney Wallace retires & more: Freedom Kicks for 8/16/21 - Black And Red United

A man screaming in the face of an elderly woman who said he wanted to be fined for refusing to wear a mask was filmed on a New York City subway train.

In a video posted on Twitter early Monday morning, you can see an unidentified man standing on top of a woman with a smile.

Im very afraid, the man ironically replies.

Keep away from me, says the woman. Before her harassment begins chanting 1776 with her fist raised in the air.

Photographed after a man harassing an elderly woman on the New York City Subway was told he wanted to be fined for not wearing the MTAs mandatory mask.

The man ironically tells her how afraid of the womans threat in a small voice

After that, he starts chanting 1776 repeatedly while raising his fist in the air.

The woman tells bystanders on the train that the man was looking down on her, and he answers: I respect freedom.

The video ends with a man shining towards the camera

Then the woman stands up and points to him, saying, Respect your elders, he tells her to sit down, and says, I respect your freedom.

The woman then repeats her claim to bystanders that strangers look down on her.

Do you know what I respect? I respect freedom. What do you respect? He asks, paying attention to the man filming the encounter. .. He then approached the pair.

What do you respect? Sit down, sit down, sit down f ***.

The video ends with a man shining into the camera.

User @Subway_DJ, who first posted the video on Twitter, said the incident occurred on the Q Train on Manhattans Upper East Side.

MTA requires riders to still wear face masks as cities have seen an increase in coronavirus infections in recent weeks

He said no one intervened despite the mans actions.

This encounter is because the Metropolitan Transportation Authority requires riders to wear masks at indoor stations and platforms on trains, buses and trams.

Riders who refuse to wear the mask will be fined $ 50. New York has lifted mask obligations everywhere else that bans healthcare settings, but private businesses can still choose to ask their customers to wear masks on their premises.

Many social media responded to the apparent hypocrisy of men, proclaiming their love for freedom and at the same time downplaying the love of women.

According to the city bureau, the incident also resulted from a variant of the Indian Delta causing coronavirus infections nationwide and also in New York City. Of health.

Much of social media has called for mens apparent hypocrisy by telling riders that they respect freedom while appearing to ignore womens autonomy.

A man who respects freedom and gives orders like authority, wrote a Twitter user.

Some said that no one seemed to take any action on the train during the encounter.

strange. Its like he doesnt know what freedom really means.

He said he respects freedom shes not the only one, a user wrote on Instagram. The video of the encounter was also shared there and was watched more than 730,000 times.

I cant wait for his apology video, another person joked.

However, some pointed out that no one seemed to be taking action on the train during the encounter.

And no one did anything, Instagram users replied.

Some social media users claim to have identified a man. The DailyMail.com tried to contact him for comment.

NYC subway anti-masker shoots a roaring I respect freedom in the face of an elderly woman

Source link NYC subway anti-masker shoots a roaring I respect freedom in the face of an elderly woman

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NYC subway "anti-masker" shoots a roaring "I respect freedom" in the face of an elderly woman - Texasnewstoday.com

Rally fronting the Maui District office of the state Department of Education on Main Street, in Wailuku. (8.13.21) PC: Gerry Comito via Bruce Douglas

For the second time this week, hundreds of people gathered for a demonstration in Wailuku advocating for medical freedoms amid vaccination mandates. An estimated 500 people attended Mondays demonstration, and participants in todays event say that number was even higher today. One participant placed attendance at 750 over the course of todays 2.5 hour event.

This time, participants say they demanded a reversal of the mandates for participation in high school sports.On Wednesday, Aug. 4, the state Department of Education announcedall student-athletes, athletic staff and volunteers will need to be fully vaccinated by Sept. 24, 2021, to participate in school-sanctioned athletic activities for the 2021-22 school year.

The message relayed by demonstrators today remained consistent with previous demonstrations, with participants waving signs that read: My health, my choice, Free the children, Protect and serve, not inject and serve, Anti-vax 2 da max, and Our keiki, our choice.

Maui police tell us there were no arrests or citations issued today at this mornings demonstration, and a department spokesperson said there were no issues as well.

For those asserting the right to gather, Governor David Ige continued to encourage physical distancing saying, The CDC guidelines make it clear that wearing masks and physical distancing are two of the most effective ways to slow the spread of COVID-19.

If I could talk with the organizers of the protest, I would certainly encourage them to ensure that they maintain physical distance, that they wear their masks, even though they are outdoors, because they are gathering in the numbers that they are. I certainly would encourage them to wear their masks, Gov. Ige said during a press briefing on Fridaythat was focused on the recent surge in COVID-19 cases in Hawaii amid a rise in the Delta variant.

When asked if a spike in cases is anticipated as a result of the demonstrations, Sandy Baz, Managing Director for the County of Maui today said:

Anytime theres large get-togethers, theres an opportunity for spread. The demonstrations were large groups of people that were unmasked. Many of them self-notified that they havent been vaccinated. So, there is a possibility of an increased amount of cases because of those demonstrations.

The demonstration comes as the state Department of Health reported an additional *1,167 COVID-19 cases on Friday, including 115 in Maui County, with state health officials calling the situation a crisis. In Maui County, there is an average of 57 new cases with a 6.5% test positivity rate over 14 days.

Maui Health officials say today, health care workers are caring for 30 COVID-19 positive patients in Maui County, with four in intensive care and three on a ventilator. All but one of these patients is unvaccinated. The hospital also announced that in collaboration with the Healthcare Association of Hawaii, it will be welcoming several rapid response nurses and respiratory therapists to assist in caring for COVID-19 patients.

County officials say they are also meeting with the National Guard on a regular basis and the state Department of Health has requested that they be used to increase capacity in contact tracing.

Meantime, schools and complex areas across the state also reported a total of 325 confirmed cases in Hawaii public schools between Aug. 7 and 13, the first full week of learning at most campuses. Excluding cases where the infected individual was neither on campus this week nor whose case required any disinfection of HIDOE facilities, there were 50 student cases 35 at elementary schools and 15 at secondary schools and 20 staff cases. On Maui, there were 39 cases reported over the same period.

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Maui Demonstration Seeking Medical Freedom Attracts Hundreds for 2nd Time This Week - Maui Now

Two salient features stand out in the history of the freedom struggle in Mysuru (then Mysore), comprising the regions from the erstwhile princely state.

One is the regions delayed entry into the mainstream freedom struggle, attributed to the cushioning provided by the benevolent rule of the later Wadiyars to help absorb much of the shock of the British despotism. Secondly, though the freedom struggle officially came to an end with India achieving Independence on August 15, 1947, the movement continued for a few more months.

The nationalistic and patriotic fervour that culminated in India attaining freedom from the British 75 years ago had a different tone and tenor in the princely state of Mysore, comprising vast swathes of the south Karnataka region in present times, according to N.S. Rangaraju, convener of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage. He said mass movements, the kind of which were witnessed in other parts of the country, were conspicuous by their absence in Mysore for a long time as people also had deference to the maharajas for their socio-economic measures.

The rapid expansion of the railways, the establishment of the Representative Assembly in 1881 to discuss public issues, the introduction of Mysore Civil Services Examination, also in 1881, the ban on marriage of girls below the age of eight in 1894, free education for girls, the founding of the cooperative movement in 1905, the founding of the University of Mysore, the introduction of reservation in jobs for backward class groups in 1919, besides rapid industrialisation and expansion of agriculture, were some of the measures initiated by the rulers that helped minimise the pinch of foreign rule, according to the Mysore Gazetteer.

However, the larger demand for independence and an undercurrent of nationalism began to permeate with broadening political activity of the Congress after the Nagpur Congress in 1920 and Belgaum Congress convention in 1924. The influence of Mahatma Gandhi was a catalyst to stir the nationalistic pride, and Tagadur Ramachandra Rao was one of the great nationalists who emerged on the scene in the region during this period, said Prof. Rangaraju. Inspired by Gandhi, he made a bonfire of his own cart selling foreign goods and plunged into social reforms, he added. Rao launched a movement to emancipate the Dalits, braving all odds in rural Mysore, with temple entry movement etc., and his struggle was recognised by national-level leaders. All of this stoked the broader nationalistic sentiment.

The visit of Mahatma Gandhi to Mysore in 1927 and 1934 helped galavanise the public and prepared the ground for mass movements. The seeds of nationalism nurtured through social reforms and political activity bore fruit when the Quit India Movement was launched in 1942 and saw students participate in large numbers.

But even as India gained Independence on August 15, 1947, agitations continued in the princely state of Mysore. This was because the people rallied behind the Congress to end monarchy and participated in Mysore Chalo, demanding a democratically elected government. The agitation culminated in a large rally on September 4, 1947, in which hundreds courted arrest. At least three, including Ramaswamy, a student of Hardwicke High School, died in police firing. The last maharaja, Jayachamaraja Wadiyar, conceded to the demands of the agitators and K.C. Reddy became the States Chief Minister on October 25, 1947, bringing to a close the last chapter in the freedom movement of Mysore, over two months after the national tricolour was unfurled at the Red Fort.

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For Mysore, it was a prolonged fight for freedom - The Hindu