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Antisemitism, according to the Anti-Defamation League, is on the rise in America. The Jewish anti-hate organizations annual audit of antisemitic incidents showed a 34% increase including incidents of assault, vandalism and harassment year over year from 2020 to 2021. In total, the ADL recorded 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the United States last year, the most since the organization began tracking in 1979.

At the heart of many of those incidents are stereotypes or conspiracy theories, many of which have their roots in medieval Europe. In Buffalo, New York, for example, when a man massacred 10 people in a predominantly Black neighborhood, he reportedly adhered to the so-called Great Replacement conspiracy theory that Jews are attempting to replace white people in the U.S. with immigrants of color.

Jewish global domination is a conspiracy theory that goes back for decades. Among the notorious examples of antisemitic lie-spreading documents is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax document pretending to be a handbook of a Jewish elitist cabal intent on global control. Portions of the fake handbook were published in 1903 by a Russian newspaper,Znamya,though its origins are unclear.

Conspiracy theories and stereotypes about Jews can be found on extremist websites and in the halls of suburban schools. Journalists, who might not be aware of them, may inadvertently perpetuate those stereotypes. I am sympathetic to the plight of journalists, says Rabbi Jerome Chanes, a senior fellow at the CUNY Graduate Centers Center for Jewish Studies and the author of Antisemitism: A Reference Handbook. Its very tough for us to know what to do on a day-to-day basis.

In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental organization founded in 1998, held a meeting called the Plenary in Bucharest. The group decided to adopt the following working definition of antisemitism:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

Professor, author and Rabbi Michael Berenbaum, former project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and first director of the museums Holocaust Research Institute, says antisemitism can be grouped into five categories:

There is religious antisemitism, there is political antisemitism, there is social antisemitism, there is economic antisemitism, there is also racial antisemitism, says Berenbaum, who served as deputy director of the Presidents Commission on the Holocaust from 1979 to 1980.

Racial antisemitism is a prejudice based on the belief that Jews comprise a distinct, perhaps inferior race with inherent genetic traits. This, Berenbaum says, was the Nazi form of antisemitism.

The Nazis were opposed to Jewish blood, he says. They didnt give a bloody damn about the identity you had, the tradition you follow, etc. They gave a damn about the blood.

The Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s may no longer exist, but there are those in the United States and elsewhere who adhere to the Nazi ideology, including racial antisemitism. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Neo-Nazi groups share a hatred for Jews and a love for Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. While they also hate other minorities, gays and lesbians and even sometimes Christians, they perceive the Jew as their cardinal enemy.

Religious antisemitism is contempt for Judaism itself, including the belief that Jews should be converted away from Judaism. It also manifests itself in broad statements suggesting that Judaism threatens other religions, such as referring to all Jews as Christ-killers. Its worth noting that the Catholic Church officially repudiated this notion in a 1965 document called Nostra Aetate, stating that while there may have been Jewish authorities who wanted to crucify Jesus Christ, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.

Social antisemitism is the exclusion of Jews from social situations. In the past, Jews were excluded from golf and sport clubs, as The New York Times reported in a 1959 article, Pattern of bias in clubs is found. More subtle examples persist today, such as holding a sports event on a Jewish religious holiday, so as to discourage Jews from attending or to penalize them if they prioritize their religious beliefs.

If youre living in rural eastern Washington, the issues that youre facing as a Jewish community tend to be that everything was presumptively white and Christian, says Ken Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate. Therefore, you may be asked to play football on Yom Kippur.

Economic antisemitism is the attempt to reduce Jewish economic influence and is often based on the false notion that all Jews are wealthy or greedy. Historically, in medieval Europe, Jews were limited to certain professions, including money-lending, in an attempt to prevent Jews from achieving too much influence. As Britannica explains, Because premodern Christianity did not permit moneylending for interest and because Jews generally could not own land, Jews played a vitalroleas moneylenders and traders.

Political antisemitism is the attempt to keep Jews out of political power, such as by spreading antisemitic messages about candidates during election season. (For some examples of how this can play out in local elections, see Rabbi Shlomo Litvins opinion piece Political debates should be spirited, but antisemitism has no place in our public square, published May 13 in The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky.)

Each type of antisemitism has its own goal, Berenbaum says. The goal of economic antisemitism, for example, is diminishment of a Jewish economic power and Jewish stranglehold on it.

For Nazis, the goal of racial antisemitism was the extermination of the Jews as a people.

If its religious antisemitism, then your goal is conversion, he said. If its political antisemitism, your goal can be the diminishment of Jewish political power, or the expulsion of Jews from the political entity.

The goal of economic antisemitism is to limit Jewish economic participation, which Berenbaum says used to be demonstrated by edicts forcing Jews to work in specific industries, or by glass pay ceilings. More recently, its the association of Jews with money.

Theres also growing concern about the intersection of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, which is opposition to the establishment and existence of Israel as an official Jewish state.

Opposition to Israeli politics is not always antisemitic in nature, according to Rabbi Elliot Dorff, rector and professor of philosophy at American Jewish University. He says Israel, like all nations, is a human society, and as a human society has things that it does that can be criticized.

But Dorff argues that anti-Zionism can also be used as a way to express antisemitism in a politically correct way.

Anti-Zionism can certainly be used as a substitute for anti-semitism on the grounds that thats more acceptable in polite society than antisemitism, Dorff says.

To help journalists identify and report on antisemitism, The Journalists Resource has compiled and summarized several academic studies and commentaries on the subject. Scholarly research can help newsrooms better understand discussions of antisemitism, identify both subtle and overt antisemitism while reporting the news, and examine their own coverage for unconscious bias against Jews.

This research roundup and explainer is published as a companion piece to our tip sheet, 8 tips to help journalists cover antisemitism and avoid perpetuating antisemitic stereotypes which will help journalists put the research into context.

A Quantitative Approach to Understanding Online Antisemitism

Joel Finkelstein, Savvas Zannettou, Barry Bradlyn, Jeremy Blackburn. American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Press, 2020

In this research paper, presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Web and Social Media, Joel Finkelstein, of Princeton Universitys Network Contagion Research Institute, and his co-authors use mathematical processes to search for and quantify the use of antisemitic language and imagery on fringe platforms.

They show that antisemitism increased significantly online during the time period studied, between 2016 and 2017, and that it fluctuates due to world events.

Specifically looking at message board 4Chan and social media platform Gab, Finkelstein and his coauthors searched hundreds of million comments for terms like Jew and several derogatory terms for Jews. They found what they term an explosion in diversity of coded language for racial slurs.

Racial and ethnic slurs are increasing in popularity on fringe web communities, the authors write. This trend is particularly notable for antisemitic language.

During the time period studied, researchers found that the term Jew appeared in 4% of posts on 4Chans politically incorrect page, and 3.1% of Gab posts.

The use of antisemitic language is increasing, the authors write, but it is not a steady increase; rather, it fluctuates in response to world events.

We find the frequency of antisemitic content greatly increases (in some cases more than doubling) after major political events such as the 2016 US Presidential Election and the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Furthermore, this antisemitism appears in tandem with sharp increases in white ethnic nationalist content on the same communities.

The researchers also looked at the spread of visual imagery, focusing on one image in particular, the so-called happy merchant meme, which depicts a large-nosed, bearded man greedily rubbing his hands together. That meme, they write represents an unambiguous instance of antisemitic hate, and is extremely popular and diverse in fringe web communities.

The studied meme was consistently shared on 4Chan, but more sporadically shared on Gab, researchers noting a substantial and sudden increase in posts containing Happy Merchant memes immediately after the Charlottesville rally.

Our findings on Gab dramatically illustrate the implication that real world eruptions of antisemitic behavior can catalyze the acceptability and popularity of antisemitic memes on other web communities, they write.

What breeds conspiracy antisemitism? The role of political uncontrollability and uncertainty in the belief in Jewish conspiracy

Mirosaw Kofta, Wiktor Soral and Micha Bilewicz, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

When the society suffers, it needs someone to blame, someone upon whom to avenge itself for its disappointments; and those persons whom opinion already disfavors are naturally singled out for this role. So begins this longitudinal study, published in a high-impact social science journal, which demonstrates that antisemitic conspiracy theories are linked to a persons belief that they lack political control, as opposed to a feeling of lack of uncertainty about whats going on in the political landscape.

That belief in a lack of control manifests itself, the authors write, in the proliferation of conspiracy-related stereotypes of Jews.

Psychological Research Examining Antisemitism in the United States: A Literature Review

Caroline C. Kaufman, Andrew J. Paladino, Danielle V. Porter and Idia B. Thurston. Antisemitism Studies, Fall 2020.

In this meta-review of studies examining the psychological underpinnings of antisemitism, researchers conclude that the different kinds of antisemitism result from different factors. This suggests, they write, that no single strategy for reduction of antisemitism would suffice.

Study selection for inclusion in the meta-analysis was reduced from an initial body of 550 papers, ultimately reduced to 15 that met researchers criteria, which included requirements that examined studied be in the English language, were empirical studies of human subjects, were recent and contained actual measurements of antisemitism.

Our review suggests that antisemitism reduction efforts should consider addressing factors concurrently in order to make a significant impact. Intervention efforts that address a single factor (religious identity, for example) without addressing other potential contributing factors (right-wing authoritarianism, racial prejudice) may not be as effective, they write.

Economic Freedom and Antisemitism

Niclass Berggren and Therese Nilsson. Journal of Institutional Economics, October 2020

This comparative study examines the ADLs global survey of antisemitic attitudes and compares it with the Fraser Institutes Economic Freedom of the World index, in an attempt to investigate why some nations harbor more antisemitism than others.

The authors suggest that economic freedom and the rule of law in any given nation have direct impacts on the presence and proliferation of antisemitic attitudes among the population. Jews are often seen as exploiters by those holding antisemitic attitudes. The authors write that when a nation has a strong rule of law, there is less of a tendency toward hostility against any groups stereotypically seen as exploitative, and thus there is less antisemitism.

The stereotype of the greedy Jew breeds more antisemitism in nations with more economic openness. As the authors write, Jews, perceived as a greedy international network with particular abilities in the area of finance and banking; and with hindrances for transactions across the countries of the world being low, they will be believed by many to be more able to enrich themselves at the expense of others.

Our empirical findings confirm the two predictions: The more economic openness, the more antisemitism; and the stronger the rule of law, the less antisemitism. These findings indicate a complex relationship between markets and attitudes towards Jews.

Arguing About Antisemitism: Why We Disagree About Antisemitism, and What We Can Do About It

Dov Waxman, David Schraub and Adam Hosein. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2021.

In this report, Dov Waxman, of the Department of Political Science at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), along with coauthors David Shraub, of the Lewis & Clark Law School, Portland, and Adam Hosain, from the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Northeastern University, argue that charges of antisemitism are often contested because there are different ways of thinking about antisemitism and identifying it.

They write that while some cases of antisemitism are blatant hateful statements against Jews the use of swastikas, for example, and violence perpetrated against Jews many are not so obvious.

Antisemitism, like racism, is not always easy to spot, they write. We argue that identifying antisemitism can be difficult and often contentious because there are different ways of thinking about antisemitism, and these different approaches can yield different conclusions about whether something is antisemitic or not.

Antisemitism, whether conscious or unconscious, is often obscured, the authors write. To identify antisemitism, the key is to focus on the perpetrators motives, focus on the victims perception, focus on objective effects or outcomes and focus on discourse and representation.

While the motives behind openly aired antisemitism can be obvious (tiki torch-wielding neo-Nazis chanting, Jews will not replace us, as happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, for example), a perpetrators motives might often not be apparent. Waxman and his coauthors argue that the range of possible motivations that count as antisemitic goes beyond conscious intentions to harm Jews to include, for instance, certain forms of affect, as well as unconscious sources of behaviour.

On the Perils of Positive Antisemitism

Yehuda Bauer and Moshe Fox. Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, 2018

While most antisemitism is expressed as disdain for Jews, the authors argue that the belief that Jews as a people are influential or wealthy can result in what they term positive antisemitism.

Perpetrators of this kind of antisemitism seek to have relationships with and the support of Jews for their own personal gain. It accepts the usual antisemitic trope of a worldwide cabal of powerful Jews who aim to influence or control parts or even all of the non-Jewish world, the authors write. But the conclusion is the opposite of the traditional one: It is a good idea to cultivate Jewish power and have it on ones side.

Authors Yehuda Bauer, a historian and academic adviser to Yad Vashem, the world Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, and Moshe Fox, a historian and former Israeli diplomat, look at positive antisemitism through history, beginning with the misconception that Jews have an outsized influence in world affairs.

It seems that the fear or glorification of Jewish power and influence has its origins in early Christianity, they write, stemming from the idea that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, and only people possessed by Satan could murder the Son of God.

In the early 1900s, the idea of a Jewish global conspiracy took shape as the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax document pretending to be handbook used by a cabal of wealthy, influential Jews.

The Balfour Declaration, rather than a hoax conspiracy theory of Jewish global dominance, was the British governments 1917 statement of support for the creation of a Jewish state. But it had its roots in the same idea of outsized Jewish influence, Fox and Bauer write, specifically in a desire to cultivate relationships with powerful and wealthy people of Jewish descent.

The emergence of that document was at least partly rooted in the antisemitic view that Jews were a powerful group, the positive conclusion being that they were worth luring to the British side, they write.

A few decades later, then-Secretary of State George C. Marshall accused President Harry S. Truman of yielding to the Jewish vote when the president recognized the fledgling Jewish state eleven minutes after it had declared independence, Bauer and Fox write, arguing that both Trumans desire to court Jewish influence and money and Marshalls assertion-had their roots in antisemitism.

Today, names of wealthy Jews such as Hungarian-born hedge fund owner and philanthropist George Soros and casino and newspaper owner Sheldon Adelson are often cited, by those espousing the conspiracies of Jewish global control, as evidence of outsized Jewish influence.

Memetics and the Viral Spread of Antisemitism through Coded Images in Political Cartoons

Yaakov Kirschen, The Yale Papers: Antisemitism in comparative perspective, 2018

A series of high-level seminars were hosted at Yale University between 2006 and 2011, titled, Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective. Exploring the antisemitism from a variety of perspectives, The Yale Papers is a selection of the papers presented at the seminars, plus other working papers, conference papers and lectures.

In Memetics (originally published in 2010) the author, a political cartoonist for The Jerusalem Post, examines common visual tropes used to demonize Jews both throughout history and in modern usage. There are, Kirschen writes, themes that have transcended history and continue to emerge in political cartoons and elsewhere in the media.

The graphic images themselves speak clearly without the words of the cartoon, as many of the same powerfully communicative images appear over and over again in the work of different cartoonists, he writes. They are like a familiar cast of characters.

For example, the use of a Star of David, often called a Jewish star, is used to signify Jews as a group. Kirschen shares a 2003 cartoon by the late Tony Auth, a longtime political cartoonist for The Philadelphia Inquirer who won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1976. (Ed. note: As described in a follow-up article in the Jewish newspaper The Forward, the cartoon depicts Arabs cordoned into jail-like sections of a Jewish star. A number of readers and observers inferred a comparison between Israels security fence and a concentration camp in the cartoon, with many offended by the use of a giant Star of David as a restrictive symbol rather than its representation as the national symbol of Israel and the Jewish people.)

Kirschen calls the use of such images, including characters with large noses, puppeteers, vampires and others, a specific set of graphic codes rich in anti-Jewish meaning.

Stereotyping codes address the question, what are Jews like? These codes transmit the belief that there is a set of traits and characteristics that is common to all Jews. They then define those Jewish characteristics and present them graphically. Stereotyping codes depict Jews as controlling the world and the media and as being money-hungry, brutal, blood-spilling murderers of everyone from Jesus to Palestinian babies in Gaza, he writes.

For example, also in 2003, another Pulitzer Prize-winning artist, Dick Locher, published a cartoon in The Chicago Tribune in which he addresses the question of how to bridge the gulf in Middle East negotiations, as Kirschen writes. The cartoon features a Jew with a huge beak-like nose being tempted to follow a trail of dollar bills.

Kirschen also examines the use of such imagery in viral memes, images intended to be shared widely on social media platforms, including images of Jews as vultures or snakes, Jews as vampires, hook-nosed Jews or puppeteer Jews.

He says memes bear significant resemblance to and pull from images used long before the digital age, appearing in woodcuts, etchings, paintings, murals, and stained glass windows.

Twentieth century mass movements used image codes taken from these medieval works alongside newly created image codes in cartoons, which were mass produced in newspapers and magazines and presented as valid political commentary, he writes.

The difference between similar imagery shared pre-Internet and in the modern era, Kirschen says, is the breadth of dissemination: What once might have only circulated around a small city, state, or even country can now freely cross international boundaries and leap across continents.

Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism

Robert Wistrich, Jewish Political Studies Review, 2004 (originally presented as a written statement at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, and published in its official record on Feb. 10, 2004)

Wistrich (who was, before he died in 2015, professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and head of the Universitys Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism) argues that anti-Zionist rhetoric often uses antisemitic terminology and concepts.

Wistrich argues that while antisemitism and anti-Zionism have tended to converge over time, they are two, exclusive ideologies.

There have always been Bundists, Jewish communists, Reform Jews, and ultra-Orthodox Jews who strongly opposed Zionism without being Judeophobes, Wistich writes. So, too, there are conservatives, liberals, and leftists in the West today who are pro-Palestinian, antagonistic toward Israel, and deeply distrustful of Zionism without crossing the line into antisemitism.

But he argues that many of the themes used to characterize and demonize Israel have their roots in historically antisemitic movements.

I believe that the more radical forms of anti-Zionism that have emerged with renewed force in recent years do display unmistakable analogies to European antisemitism immediately preceding the Holocaust, he writes.

The movement to boycott Israeli made goods, for example, arouses some grim associations and memories among Jews of the Nazi boycott that began in 1933. (Indeed, such actions go back at least fifty yearsearlier when anti-Semitic organizations first used economic boycotts as a weapon against Jewish competitors).

Perhaps more blatantly, some anti-Zionists have compared Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people to the Nazi Party and its systematic extermination of Jews, LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups, Wistrich writes.

Anti-Zionists who insist on comparing Zionism and the Jews with Hitler and the Third Reich appear unmistakably to be de facto anti-Semites, even if they vehemently deny the fact, Wistrich writes. This is largely because they knowingly exploit the reality that Nazism in the postwar world has become the defining metaphor of absolute evil.

The photo accompanying this post was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license. No changes were made.

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Antisemitism on the rise in America: An explainer and research roundup - Journalist's Resource

Before getting to that question, let's first ask ourselves, what exactly is a meme stock?

The term "meme" was first coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, where Dawkins explored whether ideas themselves could be subject to the same evolutionary pressures as genes. The study of how ideas replicate and spread is now known as "memetics".

When we connect this idea of a meme to investing, we get the concept of a meme stock. A meme stock is a stock that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.

Bear with me while I take this just a step further. Stocks are also called equities, right?

Equity is typically defined as the amount of money that shareholders will get paid if all of the company's assets were liquidated and all of the debts paid off. It's more or less synonymous with cold hard cash.

Admittedly, "meme equity" doesn't quite have the same ring as meme stock, but I do think that it's a more accurate description of what investors who buy shares of GameStop are getting.

I think that it also provides a better light with which to ask ourselves whether or not a stock split in GameStop is likely to benefit shareholders.

Looking at GameStop's balance sheet, it's clear that there has been a substantial increase in the equity enjoyed by shareholders over the past year.

As of 31 January 2021, shareholder equity was $436.7 million. A year later, on 31 January 2022, that increased to $1.6 billion. That's a big increase. The "per share" equity went from $6.70 to $21.11. Apparently, being a meme stock has been good for shareholder equity.

How exactly did this increase in shareholder equity come about? Was it because GameStop made a huge profit in 2021? No. GameStop's expenses exceeded its revenues in 2021 for a loss of $381.6 million.

So how did GameStop more than triple shareholder equity in 2021? It printed more stock and sold it in the public markets to raise cash to pay off debt. Less debt equals more shareholder equity. No doubt, that's a pretty cool gig when you can get it.

In the 2022 SEC filing by GameStop announcing the upcoming shareholder vote on a stock split, we learned that GameStop intends to ask shareholders to vote for an increase in the number of authorised shares of Class A common stock from 300 million to 1 billion. That's a lot more shares!

What's curious is that there are currently only 75.9 million shares of GameStop that are publicly traded, which means that GameStop still has 224.1 million shares to work with if it wants to do a stock dividend.

It's already got nearly 3 times its current publicly traded shares available to do a split. With the available shares, GameStop could do a nearly 4 for 1 stock split.

Is it going to try to do a 10 for 1 stock split to try to bring its stock down to the $10 per share range?

It's hard to say, which is always the case with meme equity. Meme equity has no connections to fundamentals. It has no connection to the one metric that everyone can measure cash flow.

Remember, the main thing about a meme-anything is that it spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and carries symbolic meaning.

From that perspective, it's perfectly clear why GameStop would want to increase its available shares to 1 billion: Its shares are now its currency.

GameStop believes that it can now play the same game as the Federal Reserve. It can literally print its own currency and then go sell it in the public markets to raise cash.

There's no denying that it worked in 2021 when GameStop's shares soared from $15 to nearly $500. So far, it hasn't worked well in 2022, when GameStop's shares have fallen as low as $77.

If you think that GameStop can rediscover the 2021 meme-stock-mojo to send its share price soaring again soon, and you want a meme-driven future, then this proposed increase in shares is a good thing for shareholders. It means that GameStop can print more money.

GameStop is betting that its brand will carry it forward to a prominent place in the world of blockchain gaming and cryptocurrencies. It's in the letter from the CEO on the first page of its annual report.

Meanwhile, the list of risks to this transformative vision is long and detailed. They cover nearly 10 pages of the annual report (pp. 6 to 15). The section on "Risks Related to Our Common Stock" is particularly relevant. Anyone considering buying GameStop should read it carefully.

What happened in 2021 is not likely to repeat again anytime soon. It was a confluence of so many single events as to be essentially unrepeatable. The best days of meme stocks are behind us. There will surely be intermittent and spectacular rallies that will be egged on by the media, but they will be more of a death rattle than a return to health.

Meme equity isn't going to be putting food on the table again anytime soon.

Richard Smith is chairman and executive director of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, a nonprofit that studies recurring patterns in economics, social sciences and nature.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article (which may be subject to change without notice) are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Finder and its employees. The information contained in this article is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice or any other advice or recommendation of any sort. Neither the author nor Finder has taken into account your personal circumstances. You should seek professional advice before making any further decisions based on this information.

Images: Getty Images, Finder, Supplied

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GameStop stock split: What you need to know - finder.com.au

1995 book by Daniel Dennett

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life is a 1995 book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author looks at some of the repercussions of Darwinian theory. The crux of the argument is that, whether or not Darwin's theories are overturned, there is no going back from the dangerous idea that design (purpose or what something is for) might not need a designer. Dennett makes this case on the basis that natural selection is a blind process, which is nevertheless sufficiently powerful to explain the evolution of life. Darwin's discovery was that the generation of life worked algorithmically, that processes behind it work in such a way that given these processes the results that they tend toward must be so.

Dennett says, for example, that by claiming that minds cannot be reduced to purely algorithmic processes, many of his eminent contemporaries are claiming that miracles can occur. These assertions have generated a great deal of debate and discussion in the general public. The book was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award in non-fiction[1] and the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.[2]

Dennett's previous book was Consciousness Explained (1991). Dennett noted discomfort with Darwinism among not only lay people but also even academics and decided it was time to write a book dealing with the subject.[3] Darwin's Dangerous Idea is not meant to be a work of science, but rather an interdisciplinary book; Dennett admits that he does not understand all of the scientific details himself. He goes into a moderate level of detail, but leaves it for the reader to go into greater depth if desired, providing references to this end.

In writing the book, Dennett wanted to "get thinkers in other disciplines to take evolutionary theory seriously, to show them how they have been underestimating it, and to show them why they have been listening to the wrong sirens". To do this he tells a story; one that is mainly original but includes some material from his previous work.

Dennett taught an undergraduate seminar at Tufts University on Darwin and philosophy, which included most of the ideas in the book. He also had the help of fellow staff and other academics, some of whom read drafts of the book.[4] It is dedicated to W. V. O. Quine, "teacher and friend".[5]

"Starting in the Middle", Part I of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, gets its name from a quote by Willard Van Orman Quine: "Analyze theory-building how we will, we all must start in the middle. Our conceptual firsts are middle-sized, middle-distance objects, and our introduction to them and to everything comes midway in the cultural evolution of the race."

The first chapter "Tell Me Why" is named after a song.

Tell me why the stars do shine,

Tell me why the ivy twines, Tell me why the sky's so blue.Then I will tell you just why I love you.

Because God made the stars to shine,Because God made the ivy twine,Because God made the sky so blue.

Because God made you, that's why I love you.

Before Charles Darwin, and still today, a majority of people see God as the ultimate cause of all design, or the ultimate answer to 'why?' questions. John Locke argued for the primacy of mind before matter,[6] and David Hume, while exposing problems with Locke's view,[7] could not see any alternative.

Darwin provided just such an alternative: evolution.[8] Besides providing evidence of common descent, he introduced a mechanism to explain it: natural selection. According to Dennett, natural selection is a mindless, mechanical and algorithmic processDarwin's dangerous idea. The third chapter introduces the concept of "skyhooks" and "cranes" (see below). He suggests that resistance to Darwinism is based on a desire for skyhooks, which do not really exist. According to Dennett, good reductionists explain apparent design without skyhooks; greedy reductionists try to explain it without cranes.

Chapter 4 looks at the tree of life, such as how it can be visualized and some crucial events in life's history. The next chapter concerns the possible and the actual, using the 'Library of Mendel' (the space of all logically possible genomes) as a conceptual aid.

In the last chapter of part I, Dennett treats human artifacts and culture as a branch of a unified Design Space. Descent or homology can be detected by shared design features that would be unlikely to appear independently. However, there are also "Forced Moves" or "Good Tricks" that will be discovered repeatedly, either by natural selection (see convergent evolution) or human investigation.

The first chapter of part II, "Darwinian Thinking in Biology", asserts that life originated without any skyhooks, and the orderly world we know is the result of a blind and undirected shuffle through chaos.

The eighth chapter's message is conveyed by its title, "Biology is Engineering"; biology is the study of design, function, construction and operation. However, there are some important differences between biology and engineering. Related to the engineering concept of optimization, the next chapter deals with adaptationism, which Dennett endorses, calling Gould and Lewontin's "refutation" of it[9] an illusion. Dennett thinks adaptationism is, in fact, the best way of uncovering constraints.

The tenth chapter, entitled "Bully for Brontosaurus", is an extended critique of Stephen Jay Gould, who Dennett feels has created a distorted view of evolution with his popular writings; his "self-styled revolutions" against adaptationism, gradualism and other orthodox Darwinism all being false alarms. The final chapter of part II dismisses directed mutation, the inheritance of acquired traits and Teilhard's "Omega Point", and insists that other controversies and hypotheses (like the unit of selection and Panspermia) have no dire consequences for orthodox Darwinism.

"Mind, Meaning, Mathematics and Morality" is the name of Part III, which begins with a quote from Nietzsche.[10] Chapter 12, "The Cranes of Culture", discusses cultural evolution. It asserts that the meme has a role to play in our understanding of culture, and that it allows humans, alone among animals, to "transcend" our selfish genes.[11] "Losing Our Minds to Darwin" follows, a chapter about the evolution of brains, minds and language. Dennett criticizes Noam Chomsky's perceived resistance to the evolution of language, its modeling by artificial intelligence, and reverse engineering.

The evolution of meaning is then discussed, and Dennett uses a series of thought experiments to persuade the reader that meaning is the product of meaningless, algorithmic processes.

Chapter 15 asserts that Gdel's Theorem does not make certain sorts of artificial intelligence impossible. Dennett extends his criticism to Roger Penrose.[12] The subject then moves on to the origin and evolution of morality, beginning with Thomas Hobbes[13] (who Dennett calls "the first sociobiologist") and Friedrich Nietzsche.[14] He concludes that only an evolutionary analysis of ethics makes sense, though he cautions against some varieties of 'greedy ethical reductionism'. Before moving to the next chapter, he discusses some sociobiology controversies.

The penultimate chapter, entitled "Redesigning Morality", begins by asking if ethics can be 'naturalized'. Dennett does not believe there is much hope of discovering an algorithm for doing the right thing, but expresses optimism in our ability to design and redesign our approach to moral problems. In "The Future of an Idea", the book's last chapter, Dennett praises biodiversity, including cultural diversity. In closing, he uses Beauty and the Beast as an analogy; although Darwin's idea may seem dangerous, it is actually quite beautiful.

Dennett believes there is little or no principled difference between the naturally generated products of evolution and the man-made artifacts of human creativity and culture. For this reason he indicates deliberately that the complex fruits of the tree of life are in a very meaningful sense "designed"even though he does not believe evolution was guided by a higher intelligence.

Dennett supports using the notion of memes to better understand cultural evolution. He also believes even human creativity might operate by the Darwinian mechanism.[15] This leads him to propose that the "space" describing biological "design" is connected with the space describing human culture and technology.

A precise mathematical definition of Design Space is not given in Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Dennett acknowledges this and admits he is offering a philosophical idea rather than a scientific formulation.[16]

Dennett describes natural selection as a substrate-neutral, mindless algorithm for moving through Design Space.

Dennett writes about the fantasy of a "universal acid" as a liquid that is so corrosive that it would eat through anything that it came into contact with, even a potential container. Such a powerful substance would transform everything it was applied to; leaving something very different in its wake. This is where Dennett draws parallels from the universal acid to Darwin's idea:

it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.

While there are people who would like to see Darwin's idea contained within the field of biology, Dennett asserts that this dangerous idea inevitably leaks out to transform other fields as well.

Dennett uses the term "skyhook" to describe a source of design complexity that does not build on lower, simpler layersin simple terms, a miracle.

In philosophical arguments concerning the reducibility (or otherwise) of the human mind, Dennett's concept pokes fun at the idea of intelligent design emanating from on high, either originating from one or more gods, or providing its own grounds in an absurd, Munchausen-like bootstrapping manner.

Dennett also accuses various competing neo-Darwinian ideas of making use of such supposedly unscientific skyhooks in explaining evolution, coming down particularly hard on the ideas of Stephen Jay Gould.

Dennett contrasts theories of complexity that require such miracles with those based on "cranes", structures that permit the construction of entities of greater complexity but are themselves founded solidly "on the ground" of physical science.

In The New York Review of Books, John Maynard Smith praised Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

It is therefore a pleasure to meet a philosopher who understands what Darwinism is about, and approves of it.Dennett goes well beyond biology. He sees Darwinism as a corrosive acid, capable of dissolving our earlier belief and forcing a reconsideration of much of sociology and philosophy. Although modestly written, this is not a modest book. Dennett argues that, if we understand Darwin's dangerous idea, we are forced to reject or modify much of our current intellectual baggage...[17]

Writing in the same publication, Stephen Jay Gould criticised Darwin's Dangerous Idea for being an "influential but misguided ultra-Darwinian manifesto":

Daniel Dennett devotes the longest chapter in Darwin's Dangerous Idea to an excoriating caricature of my ideas, all in order to bolster his defense of Darwinian fundamentalism. If an argued case can be discerned at all amid the slurs and sneers, it would have to be described as an effort to claim that I have, thanks to some literary skill, tried to raise a few piddling, insignificant, and basically conventional ideas to "revolutionary" status, challenging what he takes to be the true Darwinian scripture. Since Dennett shows so little understanding of evolutionary theory beyond natural selection, his critique of my work amounts to little more than sniping at false targets of his own construction. He never deals with my ideas as such, but proceeds by hint, innuendo, false attribution, and error.[18]

Gould was also a harsh critic of Dennett's idea of the "universal acid" of natural selection and of his subscription to the idea of memetics; Dennett responded, and the exchange between Dennett, Gould, and Robert Wright was printed in the New York Review of Books.[19]

Biologist H. Allen Orr wrote a critical review emphasizing similar points in the Boston Review.[20]

The book has also provoked a negative reaction from creationists; Frederick Crews writes that Darwin's Dangerous Idea "rivals Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker as the creationists' most cordially hated text."[21]

Read the original post:

Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Wikipedia

Belgian cyberneticist (born 1960)

Francis Heylighen

Francis Paul Heylighen (born 27 September 1960) is a Belgian cyberneticist investigating the emergence and evolution of intelligent organization. He presently works as a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (the Dutch-speaking Free University of Brussels), where he directs the transdisciplinary research group on "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition"[1][2] and the Global Brain Institute. He is best known for his work on the Principia Cybernetica Project, his model of the Internet as a global brain, and his contributions to the theories of memetics and self-organization. He is also known, albeit to a lesser extent, for his work on gifted people and their problems.

Francis Heylighen was born on September 27, 1960 in Vilvoorde, Belgium. He received his high school education from the "Koninklijk Atheneum Pitzemburg" in Mechelen, in the section Latin-Mathematics. He received his MSc in mathematical physics in 1982 from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), where he also received his PhD Summa cum Laude in Sciences in 1987[3] for his thesis, published in 1990, as "Representation and Change. A Metarepresentational Framework for the Foundations of Physical and Cognitive Science."[4]

In 1983 he started working as a researcher for the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (NFWO). In 1994 he became a tenured researcher at the NFWO and in 2001 a research professor at the VUB. Since 1995 he has been affiliated with the VUB's Center Leo Apostel for interdisciplinary studies.[5] In 2004 he created the ECCO research group[6] which he presently directs. Thanks to a grant from a private sponsor, in 2012 he additionally founded the Global Brain Institute at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, becoming its first director.

In 1989 Valentin Turchin and Cliff Joslyn founded the Principia Cybernetica Project, and Heylighen joined a year later. In 1993 he created the project's encyclopedic site, one of the first complex websites in the world. In 1996, Heylighen founded the "Global Brain Group", an international discussion forum that provides a working platform for most of the scientists who have worked on the concept of emergent Internet intelligence.[5] Heylighen was also one of the founders and former editor of the Journal of Memetics[7] which ceased publication in 2008.

Heylighen is a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science,[8] and a member of the Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems of the World Economic Forum.[9] His biography has been listed since 2002 in Marquis Who's Who in the world.[10] In 2015, he received an "Outstanding Technology Contribution Award" from the Web Intelligence Consortium,[11] for his research on the Global Brain.

His research focuses on the emergence and evolution of complex, intelligent organization. Applications include the origin of life, the development of multicellular organisms, knowledge, culture, and societies, and the impact of information and communication technologies on present and future social evolution.

Heylighen's scientific work covers an extremely wide range of subjects, exemplifying his intellectual curiosity and fundamentally transdisciplinary way of thinking. In addition to the topics mentioned above, his publications cover topics such as the foundations of quantum mechanics, the structure of space-time, hypermedia interfaces, the psychology of self-actualization and happiness, the market mechanism, formality and contextuality in language, causality, the measurement of social progress, the mechanism of stigmergy and its application to the web.

This broad variety of work is held together by two basic principles. The relational principle notes that phenomena do not exist on their own, but only in relation (connection or distinction) to other phenomena. They thus only make sense as part of an encompassing network or system.[12] The evolutionary principle notes that variation through (re)combination of parts and natural selection of the fitter combinations results in ever more complex and adaptive systems. This principle is a direct application of Universal Darwinism, the idea that Darwinian mechanisms can be extended to virtually all disciplines and problem domains.

The two principles come together in Heylighen's concept of a distinction dynamics.[13] In his analysis, classical scientific methodology is based on given, unchanging distinctions between elements or states. Therefore, it is intrinsically unable to model creative change. But the evolutionary principle makes distinctions dynamic, explaining the creation and destruction of relations, distinctions and connections, and thus helping us to understand how and why complex organization emerges.

Moreover, any system must be adapted to its environment, which implies that it is able to react adequately to changes in that environment. This is the origin of mind or intelligence, as the system should be able to select the right actions for the given conditions. These "condition-action" relations are the basis of knowledge.[14] As systems evolve, their adaptiveness tends to increase, and therefore also their knowledge or intelligence. Thus, the general trend of evolution is self-organization, or a spontaneous increase in intelligent organization.

Together with Cliff Joslyn and the late Valentin Turchin, Heylighen is a founding editor of the Principia Cybernetica Project, which is devoted to the collaborative development of an evolutionary-systemic philosophy. He created its website, the Principia Cybernetica Web,[15] in 1993, as one of the first complex webs in the world. It is still viewed as one of the most important sites on cybernetics, systems theory and related approaches.

In 1996, Heylighen founded the "Global Brain Group",[16] an international discussion forum that groups most of the scientists who have worked on the concept of emergent Internet intelligence.[5] Together with his PhD student Johan Bollen, Heylighen was the first to propose algorithms that could turn the world-wide web into a self-organizing, learning network that exhibits collective intelligence, i.e. a Global brain.

In the 2007 article "The Global Superorganism: an evolutionary-cybernetic model of the emerging network society" Heylighen gave a detailed exposition of the superorganism/global brain view of society, and an examination of the underlying evolutionary mechanisms, with applications to the ongoing and future developments in a globalizing world. Presently, he is developing a detailed mathematical and simulation model of the global brain, together with his collaborators in the Global Brain Institute.[17]

Heylighen has published over 100 papers and a book.[18] A selection:

See the article here:

Francis Heylighen - Wikipedia

Endnotes

iTerminology used in the summary is consistent with the respective references. As a result, there may be variability in the use of terms, for example, black versus African American.

iiThe term minority, when used in a summary, refers to racial/ethnic minority, unless otherwise specified.

Thoits PA. Mechanisms linking social ties and support to physical and mental health. J Health Soc Behav. 2011;52(2):14561.

Berkman LF, Syme SL. Social networks, host resistance, and mortality: a nine-year follow-up study of Alameda County residents. Am J Epidemiol. 1979;109(2):186204.

Keyes CL, Michalec B. Viewing mental health from the complete state paradigm. In: Scheid TL, Brown TN, editors. A Handbook for the Study of Mental Health: Social Contexts, Theories, and Systems. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; 2010. p. 12534.

Holt-Lunstad J, Smith TB, Layton JB. Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review. PLoS Med. 2010;7(7):e1000316.

Umberson D, Montez JK. Social relationships and health a flashpoint for health policy. J Health Soc Behav. 2010;51(1 Suppl):S5466.

Kawachi I, Berkman L. Social cohesion, social capital, and health. In: Berkman LF, Kawachi I, editors. Social Epidemiology. New York: Oxford University Press; 2000. p. 17490.

Bourdieu P. Forms of capital. In: Richardson JG, editor. Handbook of Theory for the Sociology of Education. Greenwood Press: Westport, CT; 1986. p. 24158.

Lin N. Building a network theory of social capital. Connect (Tor). 1999;22(1):2851.

Granovetter M. The strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited. Sociol Theory. 1983;1:20123.

Berkman LF, Glass T, Brissette I, Seeman TE. From social integration to health: Durkheim in the new millennium. Soc Sci Med. 2000;51(6):84357.

Berkman LF, Glass T. Social integration, social networks, social support and health. In: Berkman LF, Kawachi I, editors. Social Epidemiology. New York: Oxford University Press; 2000.

Kawachi I, Kennedy BP, Lochner K, Prothrow-Stith D. Social capital, income inequality, and mortality. Am J Public Health. 1997;87(9):149198.

Gilbert KL, Quinn SC, Goodman RM, Butler J, Wallace J. A meta-analysis of social capital and health: a case for needed research. J Health Psychol. 2013;18(11):138599. doi: 10.1177/1359105311435983

Sampson RJ, Raudenbush SW, Earls F. Neighborhoods and violent crime: a multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science. 1997;277(5328):91824.

Browning CR, Cagney KA. Neighborhood structural disadvantage, collective efficacy, and self-rated physical health in an urban setting. J Health Soc Behav. 2002;43(4):38399.

Matsaganis MD, Wilkin HA. Communicative social capital and collective efficacy as determinants of access to health-enhancing resources in residential communities. J Health Commun. 2015;20(4):110. doi: 10.1080/10810730.2014.927037

Idler E. Religion: The invisible social determinant. In: Idler E, editor. Religion as a Social Determinant of Public Health. New York: Oxford University Press; 2014. p. 130.

Maselko J, Hughes C, Cheney R. Religious social capital: its measurement and utility in the study of the social determinants of health. Soc Sci Med. 2011;73(5):75967.

Christakis NA, Fowler JH. Social contagion theory: examining dynamic social networks and human behavior. Stat Med. 2013;32(4):55677.

Christakis NA, Fowler JH. The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. N Engl J Med. 2007;357(4):37079.

Christakis NA, Fowler JH. The collective dynamics of smoking in a large social network. N Engl J Med. 2008;358(21):224958. doi: 10.1056/NEJMsa0706154

Rosenquist JN, Murabito J, Fowler JH, Christakis NA. The spread of alcohol consumption behavior in a large social network. Ann Intern Med. 2010;157(7):42633. doi: 10.7326/0003-4819-152-7-101004060-00007

Uchino B. Social support and health: a review of physiological processes potentially underlying links to disease outcomes. J Behav Med. 2006;29:37787.

Cohen S, Wills TA. Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychol Bull. 1985;98(2):310.

Knox SS, Adelman A, Ellison CR, Arnett DK, Siegmund KD, Weidner G, et al. Hostility, social support, and carotid artery atherosclerosis in the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Family Heart Study. Am J Cardiol. 2000;86:108689.

Finch BK, Vega WA. Acculturation stress, social support, and self-rated health among Latinos in California. J Immigr Health. 2003;5(3):10917.

Marsden P. Memetics and social contagion: two sides of the same coin?. JoM-EMIT. 1998;2(2):17185.

Berkman LF. The role of social relations in health promotion. Psychosom Med. 1995;57(3):24554.

Van Tilburg T. Losing and gaining in old age: changes in personal network size and social support in a four-year longitudinal study. J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci. 1998;53(6):S31323.

Cooney A, Dowling M, Gannon ME, Dempsey L, Murphy K. Exploration of the meaning of connectedness for older people in longterm care in context of their quality of life: a review and commentary. Int J Older People Nurs. 2014;9(3):19299. doi: 10.1111/opn.12017

Tomaka J, Thompson S, Palacios R. The relation of social isolation, loneliness, and social support to disease outcomes among the elderly. J Aging Health. 2006;18(3):35984.

Chen-Edinboro LP, Kaufmann CN, Augustinavicius JL, Mojtabai R, Parisi JM, Wennberg AMV, et al. Neighborhood physical disorder, social cohesion, and insomnia: results from participants over age 50 in the health and retirement study. Int Psychogeriatr. 2015;27(2):28996. doi: 10.1017/S104161021400182

Klinenberg E. Heat wave: a social autopsy of disaster in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 2015.

Anderson LM, Scrimshaw SC, Fullilove MT, Fielding JE. The Community Guides model for linking the social environment to health. Am J Prev Med. 2003;24(3 Suppl)1220.

Hunter BD, Neiger B, West J. The importance of addressing social determinants of health at the local level: the case for social capital. Health Soc Care Commun. 2011;19(5):52230. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2524.2011.00999.x

Liao Y, Siegel PZ, White S, Dulin R, Taylor A. Improving actions to control high blood pressure in Hispanic communitiesRacial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health Across the US Project, 20092012. Prev Med. 2016;83:1115.

Buckner-Brown J, Sharify DT, Blake B, Phillips T, Whitten K. Using the Community Readiness Model to examine the built and social environment: a case study of the High Point Neighborhood, Seattle, Washington, 20002010. Prev Chronic Dis. 2014;11:e194.

Continue reading here:

Social Cohesion | Healthy People 2020

Neither the author, Tim Fries, nor this website, The Tokenist, provide financial advice. Please consult ourwebsite policyprior to making financial decisions.

On March 1st, AMC Entertainment released its Q4 2021 earnings along with the years results. With the governments responses to Covid-19 waning, the theater chain is finally seeing the light at the end of the lockdown tunnel. However, the market seems yet to be impressed.

Here is the brief roundup of AMCs gains and losses compared to previous periods:

Overall, the quarterly losses were on the lower end of the spectrum, from last months estimated between $114.8m $194.8m. Notably, for the first time in two years, AMC reached positive EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization).

This translated into positive cash, measured by non-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) to over $220 million for Q4 2021. AMCs CEO Adam Aron framed the earnings report as leaving the worst behind.

Our positive recovery glide path from the global pandemic continued in earnest in the fourth quarter

Aron further noted that AMC retail investors were critical in supplying the company with a monetary war chest, stemming from memetics against Wall Street hedge funds. Recently, even Citadel withdrew more of its $2 billion from Melvin Capital after its abysmal performance. Aron noted that right now, its $1.8 billion cash reserve is its greatest asset, taking care on how to invest it across AMCs three core business models:

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According to Adam Aron, AMC is firmly in the hands of retailers, to whom it owes its existence.

If you exclude index funds who have no choice but to own and hold AMC shares, individual retail investors would seem to own more than 90% of our officially issued 516 million shares as of today.

In other words, as Aron often points out on social media, retailers own 90% of the float, which is the total number of shares available for public trade. Given the history of the short squeeze saga and the concern about naked shorting and dark pools, Aron assuaged these fears in the report by saying that:

no reliable information on naked shorting or so-called fake shares or so-called synthetic shares.

However, according to Fidelitys report on AMCs float structure consisting of 516 million shares, 34.4% of the float is in institutional hands.

At the head are the worlds largest asset managers, Vanguard Group and Blackrock, with 9.17% and 8.36% ownerships respectively. All others fall under 3%. Nonetheless, Aron appears to be proceeding with the plan to introduce a number of upgrades to how retailers interact with AMC.

Namely, introducing Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) as the biggest meme coins with a $30 billion total market cap between the two.

We expect that our market share among that audience will grow when we can take cryptocurrencies.

Interestingly, despite the high volatility of both dog coins, AMC underperformed both of them after the earnings report, dropping by 4%.

This may be due to the fact that AMCs price moves were already priced in because Aron pre-released unaudited Q4 2021 figures all the way back in January. There is also the matter of AMCs ongoing debt problem. To stay afloat over the last two years, and even prior, AMC had to accrue a lot of debt.

September 2016 was the last period in which AMCs long-term debt was under $2 billion. Ever since, AMCs debt is hovering mostly at over double that, at the current $5.5 billion. In the most recent debt refinancing deal in February, AMC committed to a $950 million bond issuance to pay off maturing debt and its fees.

Unexpectedly, this was almost double from the initial target of $500 million with a 10.5% interest rate. The new $950 will have an interest rate of 7.5% up until 2029. Interestingly, that exact percentage is the current 40-year-high inflation rate the Fed is trying to squash with announced March interest rate hikes.

This will mean that borrowing money will be a lot more expensive for companies, often resulting in taper tantrums and stock market downturns.

Update (8th March 2022, 10:00 am GMT): Changed Citadel Securities to Citadel. Citadel LLC and Citadel Securities are two separate businesses.

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About the author

Tim Fries is the cofounder of The Tokenist. He has a B. Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Tim served as a Senior Associate on the investment team at RW Baird's US Private Equity division, and is also the co-founder of Protective Technologies Capital, an investment firm specializing in sensing, protection and control solutions.

See the original post here:

AMC Dips 4% Despite Strongest Earnings in 2 Years - The Tokenist

When it comes to the nuts and bolts of any culture, it's all about memes. From fashion styles to fiat currency, memes manifest as commonly shareable beliefs and behaviors. For memes to spread, they have to tap into some kind of instinct or idea that has value and be worthy of spreading.

This is the story of Dogecoin (DOGE), the first memecoin that set the trend for others to follow. Having launched on the back of a Shiba Inu dog photo in 2013 when it went viral, the image became a brand for the coin. It represents a flexible template for an assortment of memes, including self-referential meta memes.

It is safe to say that 2021 was marked by the rise of NFTs and memecoins, both sharing memetic imagery, to gain traction and explode trading volumes. But have memecoins exhausted their memetic potential to thrive in 2022?

The current state of memecoins

The total market cap of all memecoins is at $45 billion, with Dogecoin taking a firm lead with nearly half the market. Interestingly, of the top 10 memecoins, only two are not related to any animals. Dog coins continue to reign supreme, while cats are represented with only one cat coin among the top 10 CateCoin (CATE).

Top 10 memecoins by market cap Photo: Coingecko.com

Magic Internet Money (MIM) diverges from the rest as a softly USD-pegged stablecoin. For the peg to remain tethered to USD, MIM relies on the Abracadabra protocol ecosystem. This DeFi protocol employs interest-yielding tokens to collateralize MIM. Meaning, if MIM trades under $1, an arbitrage mechanism kicks in and drops the MIM price, so traders are incentivized to buy it.

Likewise, if MIM trades above $1, there is an incentive to borrow MIM and sell it high. Spell Token (SPELL) also hails from the Abracadabra system, as a governance token for the protocol that can be staked for rewards.

In a nutshell, SPELL and MIM offer a decentralized banking service of borrowing and lending via liquidity providers (LPs), as MIM coins can be swapped for regular stablecoins such as USDT or USDC.

As far as memecoins go, it's not bad to fuse memetics with propositional value in one ecosystem. However, can that be said of the dog family of coins as well?

What drives memecoin value?

To understand if memecoins have a future, we first need to figure out what has driven them so far. Interestingly, of four top dog coins, the alpha dog with the largest market cap, DOGE, performed the worst. While, Dogelon Mars (ELON) had a stellar performance in the last six months with a 753% rise.

Dog coin comparison Photo: Trading View

After its initial success, it seems that DOGE has become stale but still serves as the reserve currency of memecoins. More importantly, given that ELON is the top performer, they all rely on Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest men alive, who has three cutting-edge companies in his pocket: Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink. Coupled with Musk's massive Twitter following of nearly 70 million people, we have all the ingredients necessary for memecoins:

With that cleared, why would anyone trade in memecoins? What value do they bring compared to the thousands of other altcoins? Case in point, Chainlink (LINK) solves a specific problem of bringing off-chain data to on-chain smart contracts. Likewise, VeChain (VET) is used to streamline supply chain management.

In contrast, with few exceptions, memecoins rely on speculation for their price to be boosted. This is why they are so centered on Elon Musk's Twitter platform. To illustrate, when Musk was hosting the Saturday Night Live show, the ups and downs of the episode could easily be tracked with the ups and downs of DOGE's price moves.

Dogecoin Price Photo: Reddit

In other words, memecoin traders are engaging in a kind of gambling. They count on other traders to commit to entering or exiting the market based on externalsocial media stimulation. Then, if they are lucky, they make a killing if their buy positions were lower than their sell positions.

Outside of such speculation, the tokenomics of top memecoins are atrocious. While DOGE has an infinite supply, aka inflation, SHIB is highly centralized and depends on the team to burn its massive supply of tokens.

With hundreds of other tokens, such as Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC), Monero (XMR), providing sound money and utility, where does that leave memecoins if all things are equal? After all, the listed coins have memes themselves. For instance, BTC is viewed as digital gold, while XMR is viewed as a privacy guardian.

Speculation may still give life to memecoins

In the end, memecoins are spurred by renewed adoption and speculation. If a notable crypto exchange happens to list a memecoin, it gives it a second wind. Likewise, for social media mentions by celebrities. Most importantly, traders who don't care about fundamentals, the so-called degens, see memecoins as a quick way to make a buck in the crypto market.

They rely on the lack of knowledge of others to hurl into the memecoin market and temporarily boost it for their selloff gains. However, mathematician Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano (ADA) as a more robust Ethereum alternative, doesn't see the memecoin trend lasting:

it is unrealistic if theres a 100x or something to expect that to happen every single year. It just cant. Math doesnt work that way.

Sooner or later, the supply of memecoin newcomers will run out. In the meantime, there are plenty of blockchain projects with tangible long-term gains. Alongside those already listed, there is Polkadot (DOT), Terra (LUNA), Avalanche (AVAX), Celo (cGLD), Radix (DLT), to just name a few, and to not even mention metaverse coins for Web3 gaming.

While they have their own volatility issues, they propose tangible value and real solutions to real issues. The same cannot be said of memecoins. In conclusion, those who love memecoin fun would do better to read up on infrastructural/metaverse/gaming coins and make them into memecoins by their own merit.

Rahul owns less than 1 BTC and 40 LRC.

International Business Times holds no liability for any investments made based on the information provided on this page. We strongly recommend independent research and/or consultation with a qualified professional before making any investment decisions.

Dogecoin Photo: Unsplash

Read the rest here:

The Rise of MemeCoins: Will They Survive 2022? - International Business Times

Handing a drink to the SEC. (Image via Kendall and Kylie/YouTube)

On todays episode of The Right Cant Meme (because lets face it, Biden isnt the dirty commie they want you to think) the Department of Transportation is in some hot water for circulating a meme that may count as illegal lobbying.

My initial thoughts about this were another meme, namely:

But besides that, what are we? In the first week of November? Memetics move quicker than Vice President Harris never mentioning stimulus checks again, baby!

This week, were using this format:

(Image via ImgFlip)

Mind you, this meme is better because it involves public transportation. You know the type of thing AN INFRASTRUCTURE BILL ABOUT REBUILDING ROADS AND BRIDGES IS ABOUT!

Now, this could have been an in-depth discussion of if this violates federal laws concerning agencies lobbying the public or Congress, but you arent here for that. Youre here for the bonus announcements that may be coming from a firm near you. Or far away. A lot of us are working remotely now. This was a bit of entertainment from your otherwise arduous wait to find out if your firms bonus is going to cover that trip to the Poconos you already registered for. Godspeed!

DOT Slammed Over Infrastructure Meme With Some Saying It Violates The Law [FOX News]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord in the Facebook groupLaw School Memes for Edgy T14s. Before that, he wrote columns for an online magazine named The Muse Collaborative under the pen nameKnehmo. He endured the great state of Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim,a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email atcwilliams@abovethelaw.comand by tweet at@WritesForRent.

Originally posted here:

The Department Of Transportation Should Leave Advertising To The Kardashians - Above the Law

Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.

IT is quite interesting to see the creative juices of Filipinos during this campaign. With social media acting as a gatekeeper to each camp and mainstream media covering the perceived candidates, a lot of optics are being made to corner the undecideds and to influence those who are fence-sitting, going into the campaign period. With 88 million Filipinos on the Facebook platform, campaigns are now understanding what digital campaigning is.

To start with, a candidate without a relational database is uncompetitive. A candidate who has not done his or her election history analysis is like going to the forest in search of the opening that one can't see because one does not understand the terrain. Ground is important even in digital because one can link each terrain in push-and-pull fashion.

Digital campaigning means the production of publicity materials and videos as a means to reach voters. The tactics of seeding, spreading and converting are the three steps one has to perform in order to enhance engagement. Engagement is a "formula that measures the amount of interaction social content earns relative to reach or other audience figures. This can include reactions, likes, comments, shares, saves, direct messages, mentions, click-throughs and more." Engagement can be measured, in fact there is a formula to determine engagement. The higher the engagement, the more traction and conversion takes place. Using applications on the other hand can be tools for organizations and an effective electronic organization means an easy way of downloading and sharing information.

The Oxford Dictionary defines a meme as "an element of culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, especially imitation." In his landmark book, The Selfish Gene, author Richard Dawkins coined the word meme to describe cultural replicators which spread through the social body akin to how genes spread through the biological body. Memes form the invisible but very real DNA of human society. A meme is essentially an idea, but not every idea is a meme. In order for an idea to become a meme it must be passed on, or replicated to another individual. Much like a virus moves from body to body, memes move from mind to mind. Just as genes organize themselves into DNA, cells and chromosomes, so too do replicating elements of culture organize themselves into memes, and co-adaptive meme complexes or "memeplexes." The study of these replicating elements of culture is known as memetics.

Memes pushed by technology have reached more people and at a faster clip. A meme is an idea that can "evolve" over time, and eventually influence culture. Memes are often associated with funny pictures overlaid with text. Yet the "concept goes much deeper, and can be anything from music, to movies, to words and their perceived meanings." Often, what is not easy to reveal is clearly seen in a different light.

Memetic warfare is availed of in the various narratives in creative fashion to dull the intent and come out comedic. It would seem innocuous or provide a lighter moment for engagement but if one deep dives into such meme, one understands that the ordinariness is actually pointed to influence people and to highlight what is not obvious or what the creator is unable to say because it might be construed as a personal attack to a sitting official of the land.

Memetic warfare is a weaponized use of memes to intentionally introduce ideas into society, packaged in a way that allows them to spread, with a goal to alter the culture and perceptions of a targeted population. There is manufactured thought which is now being peddled in creation of certain narratives.

Digitized influence operations have become the new norm for controlling the electoral process, public opinion and narrative." And as we have seen, "the cyber war has moved beyond the battlefield into an all-encompassing struggle in economics, politics and culture, along with old-school physical confrontation."

A goal of memetic warfare isn't to alter reality, but instead to alter the perceived reality the perception that one is leading the pack becomes the main driver. There is manufactured thought and perception warfare and these are all felt in the current campaign season we have today. Take the case of a certain candidate whose supporters are changing the results of a survey and peddling it as the "real survey," distributed to all supporters via various applications and shared to all supporters.

Another presidential candidate hits up shadows to land the headline and be part of the news arc. Still another would distribute money, reasoning out that it is being done pre-campaign, memes and videos are treated separately since that was the time when the candidate was not yet into presidential politics.

So, who is the presidential candidate who is not weak? Who used cocaine? Why launch an attack against all candidates? Simple, because the endorsed has no traction? Or are the people asking him to start standing alone and not rely so much on the incumbent? But how do you pivot in such a framing? Use memes, and people will be able to push it, sharing it to all and ensuring the messaging reaches those that need to be engaged. And this is the way some are making their point heard without hurting the old man. The optics are very visual from the united camp while the optics of the incumbent seems to be all loud noise.

The memes will be here to stay and we will see more and more memes as we hit the campaign period because the very institution of the presidency is involved.

Go here to read the rest:

Power of memes - The Manila Times

A few years back we launched an investigation into the origins of the internets favourite fake lineup shot.

While we managed to draw a few concrete conclusions back then, we fell short of identifying where the image actually came from. Then, last year, after wed all but forgotten about it, we discovered that our article had been shared by someone on Facebook claiming responsibility for the creation of the iconic image. Furthermore, that person happened to be a world-renowned artist and surfer, known for work that often focusses on exotic pastiche set in the Island of the Gods. Convinced wed found our man, we hit him up for an interview, which appeared alongside some of his work in Vol 260. Here, weve shared that feature in full, re-releasing the story back into the internet wilds from whence it came. For more strange, intriguing and enlightening tales from the full spectrum of surf culture, subscribe to our print edition today.

Ashley Bickerton is one of those people with an accent you just cant place; the strange lilt of a man who sees himself as an outsider wherever he goes. Born in Barbados, his fathers job saw the family living across four different continents before Bickertons 12th birthday, at which point they finally settled in Hawaii, where he promptly learnt to surf. After attending art school in California, he moved to New York in 82, where his central role in the emerging Neo-Geo movement saw him lauded as one of the most important new discoveries in the international art world.

However, after 12 years in the city, with what he describes as a career and marriage in tatters he upped sticks and moved to Bali, where hes resided ever since. Nowadays, he works largely in mixed media, combining photographic elements with paint and found objects to create bright, garish pieces that trade in parody and exoticism.

In this interview though, Im not going to ask him about any of his critically acclaimed works, like those that hang on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate or the Whitney. But rather an image he knocked together on his computer at some faintly remembered time back in the late 2000s. An image thats never attributed to him, but is almost certainly his most-viewed work. Its the image he calls The Endless Wave.

An early version of The Endless Wave, created on Photoshop by Ashley Bickerton.

LG: When did you first have the idea to create this now-iconic lineup shot and what was the thinking behind it?

AB: While I am in no way self-taught as an artist, I am pretty much self-taught in Photoshop. One way I honed my skills in the early days was to create slightly pornographic, but highly idealized female forms. The best of these would be nude sand-covered and glistening hula girls lolling on white-sand beaches with flawless aquamarine tubes peeling across the reefs in the background. While I was well aware that this was both corny as hell and highly indulgent, and that I might never exhibit it in a formal art world context, the painstaking task of making them nevertheless had the power to hold my interest for literally hours on end, sometimes through the night. With this as a driving force, I learned the sleight of hand skills that constitute what must be considered a contemporary form of cultural shamanism; the ability to bend perception, and thus alter reality. Once I had mastered the creating of the perfect nude, as a lifelong surfer, the next obvious choice was to construct the perfect wave. My perfect wave. To give flesh to the unattainable.

LG: In the past, Ive attempted to figure out how the image was made and what photographic elements comprise it. Am I right in thinking it was based on an image by Alejandro Plesch of Impossibles in Bali and that it was originally a four-wave set that has been chopped up and repeated above and below it?

AB: Some of that is correct. That was one of the base images I used, but only one of several. All were shots of Imposibles, a wave I know very well having owned one of the original shacks in front of the break for years. What I have learned in Photoshop is that it is most effective not to add too much of ones own information, but to source from multiple images of the same subject, shot from the same vantage point, and with more or less consistent lighting. There are actually several versions of the image floating around out there, all at different stages of development. The final one was a two-way peak breaking down either flank of an endless triangular sandbar.

Ashley in his Bali studio in 2005. Photo courtesy of the artist.

LG: What else can you tell us about the photographic elements used to compose the image?

AB: The tubes themselves are all lifted from multiple images of Padangs inside bowl section. Unlike the supposition offered by a poster on your previous [online] article, no clone stamp was used. Thats just laziness. Each tube shot was unique, in some cases, two shots ended up being used for each tube and its offshore spume. There were all carefully stitched together on top of the base of three or four Impossibles line-ups stacked one on top of the other.

LG: And do you have any idea why it is so widely attributed to Chicama?

AB: Lazy or wishful thinking, confirmation biases in action, the usual suspects. Many, many waves peeling in mechanical unison and shot from a high angle with an apparent rocky littoral equals Chicama. Why go further? The truth is, there probably has never been a wave at Chicama that has pitched from crest to trough, and there probably has never been a set in the history of oceans that has been able to pump out a 12 wave set that will uniformly light up with perfect balance the entire length of a kilometre long reef, point or sandbar.

The most widely shared iteration of the image.

LG: Where did you first publish it?

AB: It was never published. I was very curious about cyber memetics and the potential of images and ideas to go viral. This image was made with precisely that in mind. I just let it out into the cyber ether about a decade ago and I suppose the fact that we are having this discussion is testament to its success.

As for how I let it out, a bit foggy, it was a while ago. Probably FB, the Surfer Magazine Forums, and I am sure other places. All were posted under my own name, but I knew that once the image got loose, my name would not matter, it would take on a life of its own. I was not interested in getting credit. It was an experiment, one that would hopefully spread some pleasure in the world.

LG: How did you expect people to regard it? As real? As art? As fantasy? As a joke?

AB: I personally dont care. I just wanted it to live in the cyberverse.

A reverse google image search for the image returns thousands of results.

LG: Id say the image pops up on my social feeds about once a month at least, posted by different accounts. I dont think its an exaggeration to say its one of the most shared surf images of all time. Did you have any idea when you made it that it would still be doing the rounds all these years later, having captured so many millions of imaginations?

AB: I had hopes, but no expectations. This was the plan though. As for why it has triggered the imaginations of so many, I suppose its the same as the images of the women I originally started with. (They are too risqu for general publication here). Fantasy constrained by credulity. If you construct a fantasy, but have the overarching details hew very closely to the known contours of empirical reality, of the known understanding of the mechanics of breaking waves and the range of real possible manifestations, but push it just those steps beyond, you have people wanting to take that journey with you, because you have kept it teetering right on that edge of credulity.

More here:

An Interview With The World-Famous Artist Who Created The Internet's Favourite Fake Lineup Shot - Wavelength Magazine